Sense to Taobao agent?

Why does it make sense to Taobao through an agent?

What's the catch for using chinese taobao agent? A small service charge. Why should I? Here's what paying that tiny 4 – 7% gets you.

1. Finally, you can pay with patience

Taobao uses forwarders that only provide airfreight, while Taobao agents provide both airfreight and sea shipping. The difference between the two options? Duration. Of course, shipment via sea is the longer, albeit cheaper alternative. And for the typical Singaporean, the sweetest deal is the economical deal.

2. Assurance against obvious defects

Quality and authenticity checks are often not covered because, well, they can't be experts at everything that's being sold in Taobao to know what's real and they can't read your mind to know what you consider to be acceptable quality.

So what do agents mean by inspection of “obvious defects”? They mean discrepancies in quantity, color, size, design and any other obvious visual defects.

Imagine this. You order an M-sized top directly from Taobao, and it arrives nicely packed – in a Large! You sigh. Even if you decide that it's worth returning, you might eventually incur a higher cost for your item. An agent could check for these things and performs exchanges, returns and refunds while the item is still in China.

3. Downsizing and safeguarding shipping

Your item is shipped domestically within China from your selected merchant to the agent's operations team there. After conducting checks, agents proceed to repack your items. If they are excessively packaged, they would be downsized and you save on shipping. If they are poorly packaged and prone to damage, they would be properly repacked to safeguard against defects.

4. Sidestepping Taobao sellers

Taobao agents bridge the geographical gap by helping you communicate with multiple sellers on a single platform. Instead of speaking with multiple, Chinese- speaking Taobao sellers who might not be as concerned with your interests, you need only to interact with a singular support personnel.

That's a whole lot of convenience for $0.04 – $0.07 per dollar spent. Using an agent makes sense the same way buying travel insurance makes sense. You hope nothing goes wrong every time you buy that assurance, but the one time something happens, it'll be more than worth it. Additionally, when nothing goes wrong, you still enjoy the personalised service from your local agent.