Tips for Taobao shopping .
Taobao.com is the biggest online shopping platform. It started in 2003 and I registered on it May 2008.
As a user who has more than 10 years experience, I have made nearly 3,000 orders. My first order was made May 3, 2009. It costed me RMB157 to buy a backpack for my Dell laptop. This bag was given to a friend years ago. We can certainly sense inflation from this historical price. The most expensive thing I have bought on Taobao is an iPhone X. Unfortunately, it was stolen in Florence one year after I bought it.
Taobao went through some big changes during these recent years. It is still the top one e-commerce giant with a steady growth. But more and more market segments are discovered and specialized by competitors. There are now diversified shopping apps on my phone, such as JD, pinduoduo, Farfetch, Sam’s club, freshhema, DDL, and etc. Nevertheless, Taobao is still my favorite. It is like a treasure trove of products and services. And the services of pre sales and after sales are dependable. I flip through Taobao now and then while I have spare time. Not with the purpose to shop, but to look at the new design of the stores in my collection. Or sometimes I will open the app to browse through different products it recommends for me, things I never need (or even never knew existed). I can always find some inspiration in it. And it can be used as a product encyclopedia. For a product, you can search and find information in so many ways, by picture, by description, by similarity with another product, either vaguely or precisely. You can also find detailed pictures, detailed instructions, various clients’ comments and pics on it, even to ask other consumers‘ opinions or ask the almost 24h online customer services of every stores.
I don’t own any stores on Taobao. So just as a consumer, I want to share some tips for shopping on it.
1. The knowledge of specialized markets for commodities helps.
A commodity goes from raw materials, to manufacturing, to marketing and packaging, and finally to consumers. This is the whole production chain from upstream to downstream. The specialized markets for commodities I am referring to are some districts or towns. In these districts exist many manufacturers specialized in the production and processing of certain categories of commodities. And these manufacturers mostly do wholesale business afterwards. Generally, because these manufacturers only communicate with wholesale to B consumers, we as retail consumers are not familiar with these specialized markets.
However, with the changes in the current Chinese retail market, some manufacturers in the professional market has begun to try the to C channel.
I have bought products in some specialized markets with Taobao, and have even visited some markets on site.
The markets I know of are listed here in the format of Product category: district/town, city, province
Glasses: Duqiao Town, Linhai, Taizhou, Zhejiang
Bed Textiles: Dieshiqiao (Haimen + Tongzhou), Nantong, Jiangsu
Pearl jewelry and pearl powder: Zhuji, Shaoxing, Zhejiang
Electronic appliances: Shengzhou, Zhejiang
Wedding dress: Suzhou, Jiangsu
Normally I will filter the place of shipment at first. Then independent brand stores with years experience are preferred. I will also check the business qualification certificate of the store to double confirm whether the area of the store is the same with the specialized market’s.
Eventually, the design, store service, price should all be taken into consideration before you put an order, just as usual.
Here is a glass store i found online. Above pics show how to find business qualification certificate of the store.
According to my personal experience, the quality of these products I bought in this way are normally good. These kind of store’s service team is usually sensitive to the production parameters. They tend to put more emphasize on size description, technology applied and materials used.
When these manufacturers transfer from wholesaling to retailing, they start from trying to build their own brands, which are generally not well-known yet. This means that the brand premium is small. Some other retail brands who spend more cost on emphasizing design concepts, hiring fancy models, etc, will eventually transfer the cost to us final consumers. Meanwhile, many factories of such stores are actually doing OEM production for other well-known brands at the same time, so their own product styles can also be very trendy.
2. Detailed information
This is just a small thing I noticed. I prefer to look at the product parameters at first than the long-winded introduction in the product details. But it depends on your shopping style. I often pay more attention to information such as material, size, model, etc. For example, when I want to buy a leather jacket, I have a certain leather material in mind, and the product parameters are more clear at a glance.
3. The joint use of Taobao & Yitao & Alipay
If you are using Taobao and Alipay already, you can download the Yitao software. Its login method and page are identical to Taobao. And in fact it is an app created by the same company of Taobao. In the shopping cart of Yitao, you can see the items you put in the Taobao shopping cart. But you will find at the bottom left of the item a rebate amount of each product. The way to get it is to click on it in the Yitao app before placing an order on Taobao. 16 days after a successful purchase will be credited the account showed you before in the form of Jifenbao. 100 Jifenbao = 1 yuan. When you have Jifenbao in any of these three apps, you can use it to pay just like money with Alipay. To change how to use Jifenbao in Alipay, you can go to the setting in Alipay - Alipay Member - Jifenbao - Automatic Deduction settings.
4. Taobao Life Bill
If you also shop on Taobao a lot, you can review Taobao Life Bill regularly. It reminded myself that I must buy less and start to save money. Because there are more shopping apps now, the actual money spent is far greater than the amount showed on Taobao Life Bill. The entrance to Taobao Life Bill is a bit difficult to find, so I recorded a small video for reference.
I had the constant feeling that the evolution of human consciousness is difficult. However, when I was writing this article these days, I took a look at my earliest shopping records. I have to say my taste is so much better now. It makes me having more confidence in human progress.
Being isolated at home during the epidemic in Shanghai, it became obvious that we have been spoiled before by the convenience of logistics, the development of manufacturing and the prosperous competition in retail. Having much more time organizing my room and my belongings, I realized that when obtaining a belonging, it should not just cost you money, but also time to treat it well and make the best out of it. This idea is going to make a difference to my shopping habit.