Online Shopping Reviews

Shop Online from China but Get the Goods from Your Local Warehouses

If you want to purchase something from China but you have too many concerns to start the venture, I would encourage you to consider some overseas programs launched by reliable online Chinese shops such as Dinodirect.com (reviewed here), Focalprice.com (reviewed here) or Priceangels.com (reviewed here).

In recent years, more and more online wholesalers or retailers based in China rent overseas warehouses by cooperating with local partners who help them manage the warehousing and shipping. This is definitely a win-win solution to suppliers and buyers.

How It Works

Generally, the Chinese online shops that use such a program are international retailers or wholesalers targeting small and medium-sized merchants. They sign contracts with the warehouses positioning in the overseas land and use the most cost-effective shipping method – ocean shipping to send a ton of different items to the warehouses first. After the goods are stocked there, the stores start to list them online for sale. Once you order an item that is available at the local warehouse, their partners will manage the delivery within one business day and you will get it in a few days only.

Pros & Cons

Shopping things from Chinese suppliers’ local warehouses has much more pros than cons. The biggest disadvantage is: the variety or the quantity of products is usually very limited. When you browse the catalog of products available at the overseas warehouse of some website, you often find that it is not that easy to find exactly what you want. This is due to the fact that suppliers only select the hottest-selling products for the overseas warehouses in order to minimize risks or costs.

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Tips on How to Save Money from Deals Offered by Chinese Sites

If you choose to use Chinese sites to shop for cheap products, you are always encouraged to check out the latest promotions in order to further reduce your cost. So the first and foremost important thing is, to get yourself empowered with the knowledge about when and where to find out the offers at the stores you are interested in. Here are some tips to help you out.

Holidays, Festivals & Events

Pay great attention to the big shopping seasons, usually internationally observed holidays or festivals, including Christmas, Halloween, New Year, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Boxing Day, Black Friday, Thanksgiving Day and more. Stores never miss out these important opportunities to boost their sales volumes as well as revenues so they tend to offer deepest discounts on the widest range of products for sell at their sites.

In addition to the widely known international holidays or shopping seasons, some tradition Chinese festivals may also be their promotional events. Seize such chances and you may find astonishing deals. For instance, many China-based trading companies launch promotions during the Chinese Spring Festival (the Chinese New Year), the most important festival of the year for the Chinese people. In the Chinese culture, the New Year means the new start and merchants like to offer specials to attract orders. They believe it is a good way to bring them luck. By doing so, they kick off their new journey to gaining success.

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Finding Top Deals: Discounted Lace Wedding Dresses at Chinese Shops

If you are a bride-to-be obsessed with wedding dresses embellished by lace, this post may help you find the best deal. To shop for any style wedding dress at a low price, online Chinese shopping websites, especially those fashion stores, are really a good choice.

I’ve introduced several big Chinese names who offer quality but cheap wedding dresses at my site again and again: Lightinthebox.com, Milanoo.com, Aliexpress.com and more. In fact, I can almost impossible to avoid mentioning them when I share the information on made-in-China wedding dresses here. In addition to the competitive original prices, the great discounts they regularly and also frequently offer are definitely a great attraction to global buyers. That is why both individual consumers and bridal apparel store owners like to purchase wedding dresses from China.

Milanoo.com

I noticed that Milanoo.com is offering a collection of twenty-five styles in lace wedding dresses with 10% off. Now the after-discount prices range from $76.49 to $215.09. There you can find the latest trends, including fall 2012 wedding dresses and spring 013 wedding dresses. At the same time, they have slashed down the prices for a variety of other lace wedding supplies such as lace wedding shoes, lace veils and lace gloves. The sale ends November 6th. Here are some of the amazing styles I handpicked from the collection:

View the whole collection of lace wedding dresses >>

Lightinthebox.com

Although Lightinthebox.com does not offer any exclusive sale on lace wedding gowns at present, I do find some really attractive deals on such dresses through filtering my search result by lace wedding dresses. Continue reading Finding Top Deals: Discounted Lace Wedding Dresses at Chinese Shops

The 112th Session of Canton Fair 2012

Canton Fair, also known as China Import and Export Fair, is held biannually in Guangzhou, with a history of over 50 years since 1957. As China’s biggest and most prestigious foreign trade show, Canton Fair boasts of the broadest distributions of Chinese suppliers as well as global buyers. With two sessions held in spring and autumn every year, each session includes several phases, which cover different fields of products so that buyers can better arrange their visits to the show.

The 112th session of Canton Fair will be held from October 15 to November 1 in autumn 2012, composed by three phases as listed below:

Phase 1: Oct. 15 – 19, 2012 9:30 – 18:00

Major categories on show:

Building Materials
Chemical Products
Hardware & Tools
Electronics & Household
Electrical Appliances
Lighting Equipment
International Pavilion
Vehicles & Spare Parts
Machinery

Phase 2: Oct. 23 – 27, 2012 9:30 – 18:00

Major categories on show:

Consumer Goods
Gifts
Home Decorations

Phase 3: Oct. 31 – Nov. 4, 2012 9:30 – 18:00

Major categories on show:

Medicines, Medical Devices and Health Products
Food
International Pavilion
Textiles & Garments
Shoes
Office Supplies, Cases & Bags, and Recreation Products

Venue Address: No.380, Yuejiang Zhong Road, Guangzhou, China

Now the first phase of the 112th Canton Fair has ended. Based on the report, the number of buyers who had attended the super show fell off by 11.4%. Anyway, the emerging markets show a robust trend and the proportion of Middle Eastern buyers, Asian buyers and Latin American buyers increased. As far as I am concerned, the performance of 1st phase of the 2012 autumn canton fair indicates that the new markets are a great potential to the development of the future international trade business. At the same time, the fast progress the online foreign trade industry has been making is probably a can’t-be-ignored reason for which the total quantity of the buyers decreased so significantly.

Being China’s most comprehensive foreign trade show at the highest level, Canton Fair targets mainly big buyers who purchase by large bulk (generally 100 pieces or more for a single order). Such a traditional international trade model is seen a gradual decline in terms of attendance number as well as turnover.

Meanwhile, more and more buyers turn to online suppliers as they can procure products in much more flexible ways by doing so. Today China has many online stores that offer whole prices for small orders with MOQ low as 1 piece only, e.g. Lightinthebox.com, Aliexpress.com, etc. Besides, buyers can shop directly online without paying any visits to the trade shows or to the factories and are able to save the time and the cost. Just click on the mouse and the orders will arrive at the door!

360buy Has An International Site

Yesterday I read from the news that the English site of 360buy.com (Jingdong Shopping Mall in Chinese) has gone live. This means the Chinese online retail business leader has started their journey to grab the global market share. Through the international site http://en.360buy.com/, buyers around the globe can shop for quality-guaranteed and low priced products from the company in an easy way.

After this famous Chinese online retailer officially joined the foreign trade arena, the competition among online Chinese international shopping sites is surely getting more and more intense. Today we are witnessing a robust growth of Aliexpress.com, Lightinthebox.com, Milanoo.com, Dinodirect.com and a few more big names on the global markets, who are enlarging their customer bases as well as enhancing their international reputation by offering quality and reasonably priced products. At the same time, they are endeavoring to perfect their service standards in order to attract and keep more customers.

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Sale Alert: Aliexpress First Big Christmas Sale for Small Re-sellers or Merchants

Aliexpress.com is offering a big holiday sale for small businesses from October 15 to October 21. To kick off the site’s first Christmas promotional campaign of the year, the products on-sale are now offered with huge discounts plus extra values based on a certain threshold of order values. Minimum order quantity (MOQ) required is as low as 1 piece only. For the majority of products there, you can get the super low wholesale prices with great discounts for a single order of less than 10 pieces.

If you are a merchant of a small or medium-sized store, don’t miss out this amazing opportunity to stock up on high-margin Christmas supplies for your inventories. As they advertised, with up to 60% off, now the margins are as high as 300%!

The Aliexpress Christmas 2012 sale offers discounts mainly in three forms:

Huge discounts on specific products. The prices you see are already slashed down by a detailed discount. You can also compare their current prices with their original prices so that you can ‘feel’ exactly how deep the discounts are.
Fixed discounts store wide. Each on-sale category page lists a number of stores which are selected to join this promotion by Aliexpress.com. Each store offers a fix discount on a certain order value threshold, e.g. $15 off per $100 or more.
Extra discounts based on a certain order value threshold. This type of discounts is offered by the site instead of by the suppliers. When your order value reaches the designated threshold, you can input the coupon code indicated on their homepage top banner at checkout to get the extra discount. For October 15, you can get an extra $10 off $150 or more by using the coupon code “christmasone”.

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