Taobao is awesome;
it’s the place to get
cheap stuff for cheap prices—or in the case of Lolita, good
stuff for medium prices. That is…until you factor in shipping. International shipping
is the killer, and that’s the problem.
Picture this:
You buy a bunch of adorable
stuff found only in Asia, and the prices are great! But eventually, the weight adds
up and your Taobao agent slaps on a huuge shipping cost. Factor
that in, you’ve ended up paying an average of 20USD per item. That might seem
fine at first (compared to prices in America), until you realize that it’s 20USD
for Taobao quality. Basically, you’ve
paid Western prices for bad quality! Kinda beats the whole point of buying
from Taobao in the first place, right?
So what to do? Well
in any other case of high shipping prices, you’d probably want to increase your
item subtotal to offset it. (I mean, you wouldn’t buy a $7 item just to pay $5
shipping on Amazon, would you?)
So Taobao shouldn’t be much different--except that because shipping goes by weight, merely adding more items won't help. The other option is to buy more expensive/high quality items, such that the shipping is well
worth it. (You’d much rather scarf up $20 shipping for a high-quality,
expensive purse than you would a cheap purse, correct?)
But by how much
would we raise the item value? Well, let’s take a look at the math:
First, let’s examine the average weight per piece of clothing:
Now let’s look at how
much it costs to ship one kilogram internationally. (I took my rates from Taobaospree,
and I’m shipping to the US.)
By EMS, the first 0.5kg is 144
元, and any additional 0.5kg is 45
元. Let’s say you buy 5kg worth of stuff--that’s a good handful items! The
average cost per kg is then:
[144 + (45)(4.5)]/5 = 69.3元 = 11USD
So it takes 11USD to ship 1kg worth of stuff. If we use the averaged
weights above, we can conclude the following international shipping fees per item:
With that in mind,
you can estimate what quality/types of items you’d be willing to pay that much
shipping for. If you ask me me, with that shipping, I wouldn’t buy anything valued lower
than $20 (126元). Paying $7.15 for even a $15 sweater would suck! (Keep in
mind that I’m cheap, hehe.)
But don’t lose
faith! Chinese prices are still cheaper, which means that anything above 100元 is probably going to be pretty good quality. In other
words, even though we can’t use Taobao to buy cheap stuff for cheap prices, we
can still use it to buy good stuff for medium prices! Again, this is only
because we live outside of China and international shipping is ridiculous.
Sorry it was a bit long; I do hope it was helpful though! And of course, these are just my conclusions and thoughts are welcome. ^.^ Otherwise, what are
your experiences with Taobao or Taobao agents?
