Making the Most of Taobao: A Crude Analysis

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 moreitems 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:

(I’ve averaged the values from this site.)

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?