Buying from Taobao

[abbby]

What is your experience buying from Taobao? My friends say there are sometimes missing items ie: chairs with no legs, cabinets with no doors.. ANd there's typically no refund policy, I find it hard to get by buying with the all wordings in only Chinese.

[therat]

you can try the english version - Aliexpress

My Taobao experience, I didn't purchase furniture before. Purchase phone casing, clothes, shoes.
So far the experience - send wrong colour, send the same side of shoes, order 1 - send 2 but I only pay price of 1.
Normally I only use Taobao when I'm going to China for business trip. I will ask them to ship to my hotel. Taobao within China, most seller provide free shipment.

My Aliexpress experience, send wrong colour of phone casing - I feedback to Aliexpress. They 100% refund me, I dont need to send back the item.

[x9200]

I only have experience with Taobao via Lazada and only back few years ago - the most unreliable bunch of sellers with the orders often cancelled long time after purchasing.
Aliexepress on the other hand, mostly positive experience with reasonable dispute handling and shipment/delivery often quicker than for overseas Lazada sellers.

[abbby]

Therat: the things taobao send wrong is just so hilarious.

x9200: aliexpress is quite good I've received refunds before for non delivery and unsatisfactory quality. But generally their product selection is rather good. I just avoid buying clothes as differ from pictures and sizes are usually ill fitting.

[Lisafuller]

From personal experience buying from Taobao has its pros and cons. One good thing is that you’re find the prices to be incredibly low, almost too low to be true. The quality is relatively inconsistent- I’ve received some items exactly how I expected in perfect condition, while others have arrived very cheap looking and made of terrible quality. One important thing to note is that in order to shop on Taobao you will need to search for your items in Chinese, which can be difficult because it’s hard to translate the name of the item from English to Chinese even if you do know Chinese. That being said I definitely prefer to shop on western e-commerce sites such as Amazon for their better user experience and better quality control.