Is there a way to filter these guys out? Anytime I search for any items on these sites 99% of all listings are Taobao shills. You can tell because they have a huge amount of items in their stores (sometimes over 300,000) and seldom answers messages and appears kinda dead. Plus their markup is unreasonable and I still have to wait the weeks or so to get the item.
Except the problem is there’s no way for me to filter them out because they still list their region as Taiwan, and to the site they are indistinguishable from Taiwanese listings. So now they crowd out Taiwanese listings in such a way that you can’t find them anymore. The only way is to spend hours sorting through the thousands or tens of thousands of listings to find what you need.
And the sites aren’t doing a whole lot about it either.
What are you searching for? I look for musical instruments, and filtering for Taiwan removes all the instruments coming from China. On some sites, checking “meet face to face” also works.
I kinda want it in a couple of days and was hoping maybe someone in Taiwan have stock. I ordered it from Taobao, I have 2 cans of R410a like this but that’s for my larger AC unit (which uses 410a) but the smaller AC uses R22. I have gauge and stuff and the adapter needed to open the cans.
I hooked up a gauge to my small AC unit because the evaporator coil seems to be freezing again, and yea, it’s low. Either the installer didn’t add enough (they are chabuduo), or there’s a leak somewhere… Probably from the charging port (they overtightened the nut that covers it and I could hear hissing when I take it off, there is not supposed to be any pressure there).
So I need to charge the system back up again.
I don’t want it in a large can because I’m not doing it for a living.
But anyways when I changed the search parameters it filtered out everything I want… so I guess nobody keeps stock in Taiwan and it’s all 100% drop ship.
I’ve been using Ruten a lot recently in the past month and have learned a few things:
Yes, there are lots of Chinese posting on it. There are also Taiwanese (or a mix of legit Taiwanese and those claiming to be, and writing in not only traditional characters but sometimes with colloquial local wording) doing the drop shipping. Some of all the above types are doing drop shipping from China. Of these, some make it clear, and some lie and say the items are in Taiwan, then 8-14 days later you have to ask the progress, at which point some say they’ve brought it in from China but it’s on its way.
If you find someone doing the latter, a quick phone call to Ruten’s customer service (with your order # handy) will spark an investigation by Ruten into that poster, and you’ll be given the option to cancel the order or have Ruten push the seller to hurry up and deliver.
Filtering for stock being in Taiwan doesn’t work well because there are PRC sellers lying that the stock is in Taiwan then making you wait while they ship it in. NOT prepaying puts you in a stronger position to cancel the order in such cases.
Looking at posted shipping time or asking it filters out the VAST majority of sellers; as nz says, if the shipping is more than a few days, they’re almost certainly shipping from China. For sellers who don’t list shipping time, ask it, or don’t order. Unfortunately, as Taiwan_Luthiers noted, on Ruten this often filters everything out. Then I go to Shopee, Momo, TeLiWu, PCHome, and Amazon and try their. I find Shopee to be the least problematic site, and Ruten most problematic, in terms of trouble with PRC sellers. I know some wonderful, trustworthy Chinese people, but they’re not selling on Ruten, unfortunately, LOL.
I had one seller who sent the wrong size table, then refused to acknowledge or correct the error or refund the money, refusing even to have someone pick the wrong one up and deliver the right one, probably because they’d already shipped it from the PRC and couldn’t easily return it. Again, Ruten’s customer service was excellent and took over solving the problem, sending me a message today saying they (Ruten) have cancelled the transaction and are refunding my money (with the implication that the seller will be forced to repay Ruten and either pick up the wrong table or abandon it). So don’t prepay unless it’s small, inexpensive items on Shopee, where you’re unlikely to run into problems and it’s easier to prepay a bunch of sellers with one ATM transfer, unlike Ruten where you have to transfer to sellers one by one, a real PITA.
I’ve concluded that at least some of the ones with the ads all in simplified characters (probably most or all of them) are PRC sellers, and also there seems to be a trend of PRC sellers using an improbably attractive young female model’s photo as their icon.
We should not have to bug their customer service over this. Ruten should have been proactive in investigating these sellers as they are not real at all. Right now pretty much 90% of Ruten’s listings are these, and you can easily tell by 1. Simplified characters in marketing materials, and 2. Impossible number of items that account has listed. If it’s up to 500 it’s likely legit. If it’s 100,000 or some such items listed under that account, it’s fake and it’s even likely listed with bots, as there is no way a real human, even an army of them, can list 300,000 items onto an account and keep them maintained. So it’s easy to conclude that they use bots.
It should have been easy for Ruten to automatically flag any accounts with such unreasonable number of listings. What’s going to happen is nobody is going to use Ruten because legitimate businessmen using that service is going to get crowded out with these fake accounts. Even Yahoo auctions have been better about flagging and deleting such accounts.
For most things its just better to order directly from Taobao. If I see something I want on these sites, I just make a screenshot and then do a picture search on Taobao!
Takes two weeks minimum to get your hands on the stuff from Taobao, and that’s assuming customs of either China or Taiwan don’t give you problems. Sometimes we need it sooner than that, and it sucks we can’t even find that anymore.
Yeah I’m not ordering right now because the flights for Taiwan stock from Shanghai. But if you don’t need something urgent, might as well order from Taobao
