Ultimate Taobao Guide You Won't Regret Reading
- singdeals
- Mar 27, 2017
- 7 min read
Hi guys! I totally love finding cheap and good deals! And my favourite site to search all these good deals is the famous taobao! Many of us shop on taobao but are you getting the best deals out of it? Impress your friends with your loots by following our guide!
Choose your forwarding agent.
I'm currently using ezbuy who was formerly known as 65daigou.
What ezbuy does is that it helps you purchase your items from taobao, send them to their warehouse in China and then after consolidating all your goods, they will them deliver to Singapore. We can then collect our parcel from their extensive list of collection points. Depending on the your shipping method, the prices will differ slightly.
I highly recommend using Economy Air unless you are buying bulky furniture because based on my experience, sea method usually takes about 3 weeks from the day you purchase till the day it arrives in the Singapore warehouse for collection. For just $0.30 cents more per 500g, you can get your parcel roughly within one week from purchase so why not?
Also, ezbuy currently have 2 warehouse with one in Shang Hai and one in Guang Zhou, when selecting the warehouse, do only choose one warehouse (most of the sellers are in Guang Zhou) and remember to factor in the time if you are shipping your items from Shang Hai to Guang Zhou.
On top of the shipping fee, ezbuy also take a 8% agent fee! However, they do have frequent promotions offering free agent fee or discounted shipping fee so do remember to keep a look out for them!
For delivery, there is 4 options for you to choose from:
-Neighborhood collection point
-MRT stations
- Ezbuy warehouse
-Home collection (only recommended for bulky items > 25kg since anything less can be collected FOC at the collection points)
For the comprehensive list of the collection points, do check out this link:
2. Actual Shopping on Taobao
First of all, it will be highly recommended for you to create an account with taobao!
Click on 免费注册 (sign up for free) and it will redirect you to this page!
First step is to verify your handphone number and then step 2 will be to write your username and password! (note: they will send a verification code to your phone for confirmation)
The benefit of having a taobao account is because of you can add items that you are considering into your cart! And you can access the cart both on your phone or desktop conveniently making it fuss-free to copy the link of items you want into ezbuy without the need to the products on taobao again.
For me, when shopping on taobao for a particular item, i will just cart items that catches my eye but have not make out my mind which to buy yet. After browsing around, i will then go to my inventory and compare prices to eventually decide on one that I should buy!
2 other awesome functions of this cart is also the tabs beside the 全部商品(all items), which is the 降价商品(items that you have carted that is having a sale now, so if you previously you were indecisive whether to buy because of the price, a discounted price may persuade you to buy it) and 库存紧张(items that you have carted that are on low stocks, and hence will advise you to buy asap to prevent disappointment)
To help you get a better understanding of how to shop on taobao, i will be showing you step-by-step with an example.
Let's say I am looking for a nice and affordable notebook to use during school!
First, in the search bar, i will type in 笔记本韩国（notebooks from Korea). If you are unsure for what is the Chinese term for it, google translate will be a good tool to help you out!
The search results will be generated based on 综合排序， where the ranking is after considering the price, the popularity, the reliability of seller and the sales volume. Usually, sorting the results this way does show you some good deals especially for the top few searches, but i recently discovered that sorting by 销量 is also a good alternative, as you can find some very competitive deals from the top few searches as well.
Here's a screenshot of the top 4 searches when sorting by 销量, and look! Just 1.85 yuan for a pretty notebook and the price even includes domestic shipping fee (shipping from the taobao seller to our ezbuy warehouse) SUPER WORTH! BUY BUY BUY!
And since all of these items are in China's currency, we will need to convert it to Singapore dollars. Currently, the exchange rate used on ezbuy is about ¥4.5 for SGD$1. Which means that the notebook cost only 40cents!
We can then click into the page to view more details. Scroll down a little and we will see this 3 tabs here! The first tab is 宝贝详情 where you can find all the product details, photos of the different designs/colours available! You can also find the size measurements if you are buying the clothes of taobao! 累计品论 will be where previous buyers who have purchased from the seller will leave their reviews!
Some of them will also post pictures and if they receive a bad product, some will also post photos of the dents/holes/missing parts to alert other buyers to be careful of this seller. This will be a good gauge for you to see if you should buy from this store especially if there prices are too ridiculously cheap to be true.
Sometimes, we come across this product that we really really like, but the price doesn't seem attractive enough! There is one method we can try to see if there is any cheaper alternative that is sold by other sellers on taobao.
Going back to the page that shows the search results, you can hover over the image and two tabs will appear, 找同款(find the same item) and 找相似 (find similar items), not all of the items will allow you to choose both options but you can definitely click on either tab to see if you can find similar items that are priced more competitively. WHO KNOWS? YOU MIGHT FIND A NEW ITEM THAT LIKE EVEN MORE!
Once we have decided on what we want to buy, it's time to head to our final step!
3. Purchasing the item on Ezbuy
First, copying the link of your product that you wish to purchase from taobao and go to the ezbuy website! https://ezbuy.sg
Next, paste the product link into the search bar
You will then arrive on this page.
You can select the option that you want and choose the number of quantity you wish to purchase. Note, for some of the items, ezbuy allows you to choose 3 different options, prime, buy for me and ezbuy. Prime is ezbuy membership and you can find more information about their membership here.
I personally tried this membership before and I will recommend it only to those who wish to purchase bulk items and furniture to sign up for this membership since the shipping fee is a flat rate of SGD 2.99 regardless of how many items and the size of the items you ship.
For items that are brought using ezbuy service , all the items cost will be pre-calculated and paid for so there is no need to make an additional payment when the items arrive to Singapore warehouse.
However, I have personally encountered a few problems with using ezbuy option. For example, when i try to pay for my items, all the items will be charged a separate shipping fee instead of just having a fee for the consolidated parcel. Sometimes, the mobile application only shows ezbuy and prime option, but somehow when you use the web browser, all 3 options are available for you to choose.
So while we wait for ezbuy to improve and fine-tune their application, i will recommend you to choose the buy-for-me option! For this option, you will pay firstly pay the price of the items you purchase and when they arrive at the warehouse in China, they will repackage it and calculate the final consolidated weight, you can then pay for the shipping fee and agent fee and the parcel will be shipped out latest by the next working day.
NOTE: Sometimes, the domestic price captured may not be accurate because the seller might have some ongoing promotion and ezbuy is unable to capture that information (for example, buy 2 for free shipping), you can edit the domestic shipping by clicking on the icon beside the price. (only for the buy-for-me option)
Click here to view Ezbuy's tutorial how to top-up your prepay balance using the different payment modes!
I will recommend you to top up sufficient to pay for the cost of your items, the shipping fee and the agent fee so that you will can save the hassle of having to top-up your prepay balance twice.
Also, I will recommend you to untick the box that says "Domestic shipping fee captured may not be accurate. You will get the extra refunded or need to top up the shortage. Please deduct from my prepay if the shortage is equal to or less than RMB 10.00". By unticking this option, ezbuy will need to inform you if there is any price discrepancies and will ask for your confirmation whether to proceed with the purchase of the item!
Do keep a lookout for any notification on your phone after you have purchased your items and the customer service staff may contact you if your items are out-of-stock, not available for purchase or they require additional information from you.
There will also be a notification to remind you to send out your parcel from the China warehouse when all the items that you have purchased and sent to that warehouse have arrived.
Ready to start shopping on taobao? We have a good news for you! If you are new to ezbuy, you can click on this link to sign up and RECEIVE FREE 5.00 CASH FOR YOUR SHOPPING SPREE.
And to celebrate the launch of Singdealz.com, we will be holding a TAOBAO GIFTAWAY!!!!!
One lucky winner will walk away with our TAOBAO BUNDLE that is specially handpicked by us!
The TAOBAO BUNDLE CONSIST OF:
PORTABLE SKY BLUE SELFIE STICK
TRENDY PENCIL CASE
COLOURFUL ZAA POST-ITS
MATT BLACK IPHONE 7 COVER
HANDY ZAA NOTEBOOK
HOW TO PARTICIPATE?
2. Leave a comment below
3.Share our Facebook post with your friends!
EASY RIGHT?
This giveaway will be open until 12 April 2017 23:59 and the lucky winner will be announced on our Facebook page!
Note: This giveaway is only for our readers living in Singapore as the bundle will be mailed via Signpost to the lucky winner.
Alright we are now at the end of the guide! This taobao shopping guide aims to be a little different from the rest by showing you the tiny tips and tricks so that you not only learn how to shop but is well-equipped to find THE BEST DEALS ON TAOBAO!
Hi guys! thanks for the support for the giveaway
The giveaway winner is Wan Ting Cheong, we will be contacting you shortly to pass you the TaoBao bundle.
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