Online Shopping Reviews

Chinese Singles’ Day (11 November): The Biggest Sale Day in China

While Black Friday is traditionally the busiest shopping day in the United States and many other American or European countries, 11 November has become the biggest sale day in China since 2009. As a tradition, Chinese people who are still single get together to celebrate their singlehood on 11.11. But the day turns out to be universal shopping spree day for all Chinese, no matter they are single or not.

As the online payment terminal belonging to Alibaba Group, Alipay.com is widely used in Chinese domestic or international online shopping sites, including their own sites Taobao.com(domestic), Tmall.com (domestic) and Aliexpress.com (international). The payment service provider is the best example of 11.11 Singles’ Day carnival sale. This year, a total of more than 19.1 billion RMB was paid through Alipay on that single day, with 13.2 billon at Tmall.com and 5.9 billion at Taobao.com, both of which are Alibaba’s domestic online retail sites. Based on the report, about 6 million orders are placed that day on a wide variety of products at the two sites, from apparel & accessories, electronics, toys, luggage & bags, furniture, home & garden, sporting goods to everything else. How crazy are the Chinese shoppers!

11.11 Carnival Sale Turnover Trend of Alipay for Tmall.com and Taobao.com since 2009

While Taobao.com hosts mostly small and medium-sized sellers, Tmall.com is the truly shopping channel exclusively open to genuine brands only. For the Chinese, it is easy to shop for cheap products at Taobao but the risks are higher as well. There you may encounter dishonest sellers who sell you crappy quality products which are not as described at all. Although Taobao provides payment protection service, when problems are incurred, it can be a real headache to get a satisfying solution sometimes.

Continue reading Chinese Singles’ Day (11 November): The Biggest Sale Day in China

How Do We Review Chinese Shopping Sites Here?

This post is composed as a response to a comment left by a user of our site, who argued that he couldn’t understand why the reviews we posted for Chinese shopping sites here are mostly positive or neutral. As he claimed, he had an unhappy shopping experience with Aliexpress.com and he believes the site is not genuine as we review. To help more readers understand how we rate the Chinese online wholesalers or retailers, I think it necessary to make the points clearly disclosed so that you can have a better decision.

Hi XXX (name hided to protect our user’s private information),

Glad to see that you come back again to share your comment here. With regard to the doubts you shed on us, we admit that as a review website we are not perfect and have so much to improve. Thank you for your valuable suggestion.

It is true the reviews we post here of the Chinese sites are basically positive or neutral. The major reasons are as follows:

1) Although we are trying to post reviews of as many Chinese shopping sites as possible, we can’t do the job now as we have planned because we are short of manpower – 99% of articles published here are written by one author only.

As a result, we put the sites we believe are better in terms of credibility and service at the top priority. While we understand that all these sites also have much to improve and negative reviews against them can be found easily on the Internet, we also know that they have tons of happy customers who have been trading with them for years. We emphasize the good sides of these stores or marketplaces simply because we are ourselves Chinese and it is our mission to popularize and promote better Chinese sites to the world. However, we never intend to overstate their advantages or spread any fake information.

All information we revealed here about them is based on our research and knowledge. To dig out information that can add values to our readers, we read Chinese newspapers, visit Chinese forums or social networking sites and communicate with Chinese friends who are working for the companies. We have good reason to say that Aliexpress.com is a legitimate and genuine site: they belong to Alibaba.com, the most famous and biggest e-commerce company in China, all foreign trade people here know this site. In fact, many e-commerce talents jump from other companies in order to join them for better career development, including a good number of my old colleges who like me worked for another famous wholesale trading platform before.

In addition, their site visits and customer quantity have been soaring since they were founded in 2010. You can search Alexa or Google trend to check their website ranking or interest trend (see the graphs below). As a young site they are developing very, very fast. I think this at least well proves that they are a serious business, not a scammer. They have defeated many powerful Chinese competitors in a short time. So despite that they do have flaws, can we say they are not genuine? Certainly we can’t.

Aliexpress.com’s three-month global traffic rank is 279! This shows the site has a large number of visits. Only big and legitimate sites are able to attract so many visits. See details here >>

From the web search interest comparison between Aliexpress.com, DHgate.com and Lightinthebox.com, the most famous Chinese international shopping sites, we can see that though Aliexpress.com is founded years later than either of the two sites, its search interest quickly leaps to the highest in 2012 (see details here). What does it mean?

Continue reading How Do We Review Chinese Shopping Sites Here?

How to Get Suitable Christmas Gifts on a Budget

The 2012 Christmas is approaching fast and it is time to plan our list of Christmas gifts for people we love. While adding gift receivers to the list can be easy and quick, many people find it a lot more tricky to prepare suitable Christmas gifts that fit each person we are going to gift, especially when we are on a limited budget. That’s why we always see people scratching about best Christmas gift ideas ahead of when the holiday season arrives every year.

I totally agree that selecting gifts for our family or friends should be a pleasant experience instead of a painful one. Anyway, I also understand that searching for the right gifts is time-consuming and can be quite a stress when we fail to find out gifts that meet our expectation as well as the gift receivers’ styles and preferences. Here I would like to share my personal advice on how to dig out the great gifts for Christmas 2012 and buy them home with a happy wallet.

Based on my own experience, for whatever holiday or festival, as long as we stick to the most popular shopping websites, it will be completely OK even if we have no gift ideas at all. All mature online shops would launch their holiday shopping promotions with neatly sorted categories of gifts that fit different needs in time. As for Christmas 2012, I have checked out a good number of shopping sites across the world and noticed that some have been offering Christmas deals with deep discounts. In particular, some Chinese wholesale or retail stores or marketplaces have been releasing sales for this Christmas one after another (see the sales listed at the end of this post).

Image courtesy of Ahappydeal.com

As we know, Western local stores start to launch promotions for Christmas from Black Friday, which follows Thanksgiving Day and is regarded as the traditional beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Unlikely, as lots of Chinese online shops serve both re-sellers and end consumers, they tend to start their Christmas promotional activities much earlier. It takes more time for an order to arrive at a destination in another country. And what’s more important, merchants need to stock up for their inventory in advance so that they can seize the best turnover-boosting opportunities and make more profits.

Continue reading How to Get Suitable Christmas Gifts on a Budget

Facts about AliExpress Scam

When I came across the so called “AliExpress scam” complaint in one forum, I couldn’t help laughing. The angry buyer claimed that AliExpress sent him a wrong item he never ordered. Based on my knowledge about AliExpress, it is no way possible as AliExpress is only a wholesale transaction platform – it does not sell any item, not to mention ship out any item to any customer. Obviously, this buyer was either ripped off by a seller doing business on AliExpress.com or encountered an unprofessional operation carried out by the seller.

In this case, the buyer should report the problem to AliExpress for mediation or contact the seller first to solve the problem. Given such misunderstandings about AliExpress, I think I should share all of my familiar facts about AliExpress, which may help you more clearly identify whether AliExpress scam is a reality or not.

Facts about AliExpress.com
1. An express wholesale channel of Alibaba.com, which was founded in 1999;
2. Officially went live in April, 2010;
3. Mainly serving small businesses, including Chinese small suppliers and global small re-sellers.
Continue reading Facts about AliExpress Scam

Preparing for Christmas 2012: Take Advantage of Thanksgiving Day Sales

This year, Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 22, 2012 in the United States. It is only two weeks away! As a day for expressing or showing our deepest thanks, Thanksgiving itself seems rather irrelevant to promotional activities held by various stores. However, the holiday is often used by merchants as an important event to boost their revenues or to kick off their Christmas sales.

The fact that Thanksgiving Day precedes Black Friday further enhances its commercial value. Traditionally regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, Black Friday is one of the busiest shopping days in the USA. It is all known that stores tend to release the biggest discounts of the year on that day in order to attract customers. But did you know that you may be able to get the same good deals on Thanksgiving Day, without waiting until the next day to snap up the bargains? If you didn’t, it is not late – it is no longer a secret to you now and you may make huge savings by taking advantage of all kinds of Thanksgiving Day 2012 deals.

Image courtesy of Priceangels.com

Seriously, if you are preparing gifts for this Christmas, you should really take a good look at the Thanksgiving Day specials available at different online shops. Oh, I almost forget to mention that by shopping Thanksgiving deals on the internet, you don’t need to rush into the stores in the crazy crowd to seize the Black Friday deals.

The only tricky thing is: you may need to dig out some useful information on where to get the best Thanksgiving bargains online. This is exactly the reason why I am writing this post. I noticed that lots of Chinese shopping websites have been launching their 2012 Thanksgiving Day sales for global buyers. Compared with local stores based in the USA, the UK, Canada and other American or European countries or regions, global online stores based in China generally release specials for a particular holiday much earlier as international shipping takes a while. Shipping time ranges from 3 days to 30 days based on shipping methods or product types. I’ve compiled a list of Thanksgiving promotions on-going at some popular China-based online stores for your reference (see below). Continue reading Preparing for Christmas 2012: Take Advantage of Thanksgiving Day Sales

Guide for Individual Shoppers: Where to Get Best Christmas 2012 Deals

Christmas is next month! Have you started planning your Christmas shopping list? I guess you might want to know where to get the best deals for the biggest festival of the year. In late September we’ve posted a Christmas shopping guide for merchants at our site (click here to read the post). Here I would like to share some reliable online destinations where individual consumers can buy Christmas gifts, Christmas decorations and any other Christmas supplies at super low prices. By the way, they are all based in China.

Did you know that today many consumers choose to shop straight from China for best savings? Especially for holiday shopping, made-in-China products are very popular among global buyers, including both re-sellers and end consumers. Unbeatable pricing is no doubt their biggest attraction. At the same time, the huge variety of products to choose from makes Chinese online stores the most ideal places for shopping. When it comes to quality standards, although some people are worried about the quality of products made in the country, most customers feel satisfactory about the quality after they receive the goods from online Chinese suppliers. The most common review regarding this topic is: they are good quality for the pricing.

In the past, Chinese international wholesale businesses and retail businesses are separated from each other. Generally, merchants would trade with wholesalers while end consumers do business with retailers. Actually there were very few China-based online retail stores before 2008. In recent years, as internet technology and e-commerce develop fast, cross-border transactions can be made in a much easier way and more and more Chinese wholesale and retail stores emerge. Besides, the traditional wholesale business model is now being seriously challenged by the new one: Chinese suppliers are selling products at wholesale prices for orders of small quantities, as small as 1 piece per order. That is to say, now even wholesale shopping websites are open to individual shoppers.

Based on my findings, lots of Chinese stores combine wholesale business and retail business while focusing on wholesaling or retailing. For consumers, we don’t need to identify which stores run which type of business. What we really need to know is where we can get the best prices. The first and foremost thing is to find out trustful stores which have gained good reputation on the global market and provide quality products as well as satisfactory service. Then, just stick to the pricing and you will be able to shop for what you want on a happy budget.

Below I will introduce some of the best-rated Chinese online shopping sites that fit individual customers like you, in terms of major categories they carry. Continue reading Guide for Individual Shoppers: Where to Get Best Christmas 2012 Deals