First time buying from Taobao - Preordering from Taobao - Warnings and Tips!
I've ordered and managed to navigate through japanese and korean online stores, but taobao is by far the most confusing online store I've tried to buy from. And there's hardly any help online in english with it! There is a sub reddit and a website with guides, but they didn't help with my situation.
There was a fanmade thing I wanted to try to get and saw from that guide website that you can directly order from taobao if you're from the US. I made an account and proceeded to preorder it. Please note that doingit like this is like using a proxy because the item will be shipped to taobao's warehouse in China first. Then you have to pay for international shipping for it to be shipping to you.
If this product was in stock I probably would've had a easier time, but since it was a preorder then it became a headache. This is because taobao will automatically mark your order as complete after a certain time. Since the product I bought took months to produce my order got automatically completed. Why is this a problem? Because taobao will no longer recognize your order and will be rejected at their warehouse once it does ship.
For some reason there isn't a way to talk to the seller on a computer, but you can on their mobile app. There's no where on the site on the computer that lets you know if the seller has contacted you either. If you need to contact the seller you will have to get taobao's app on your phone. I used DeepL to translate my words into chinese to talk to the seller who thankfully has replied to me. If you were to talk to sellers please keep sentences as simple as possible because machine translation doesn't really make longer sentences make sense.
The seller didn't want to ship it before confirming the address with me because the address is a warehouse which is understandable. This is when I learned taobao had rejected the package. So I had to look up a proxy. I've heard people use Sueprbuy so I used them and told the seller the address superbuy gave me. And luckily it did reach Superbuy and they accepted it! And yes, shipping from superbuy is like double the price I would pay for shipping from Japan. My package was the size of a poptart box and it costed me $40! YIKES! But I am happy to have bought this so even though it was an expensive ordeal to get it I don't regret it!!!
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