Choosing a seller when you cannot read the shop
Four of the nine categories that can never be returned are properties of the seller or the listing, not of the product. You can be outside the guarantee before you have picked a size.
Type what you are looking for, in English. Results are product cards you can hand to the agent.
Browse
Each of these opens a category of listings. What follows is how to tell the shops apart once you are there.
First filter
Four exclusions that are about the shop
Most advice about choosing sellers is about quality. This one is about rights, and it is checkable before you order.
Bought outside mainland China. Goods from overseas, Hong Kong and Macao. A seller shipping from Hong Kong, Macao or anywhere outside the mainland puts the order outside the guarantee entirely, and plenty of listings do exactly that without making a point of it.
Second hand. Second-hand goods, so a shop dealing in pre-owned or vintage stock is the same situation. Made to order or altered rules out anything made or altered to order, which includes a great deal of what gets described as bespoke. And Tags or packaging removed on request is the one you can trigger yourself: ask for tags, packaging or accessories to be removed and the item stops being returnable.
None of those four is about whether the seller is good. They are about whether a return is possible at all, which is worth settling first because it is binary.
Signals
What is worth reading on a listing, and what is noise
You cannot read the shop's name, and translation will not help much because shop names are not descriptive. What survives translation is structure.
| Signal | Worth reading because |
|---|---|
| Where the shop ships from | It decides whether the guarantee applies at all. The hardest single fact on the page. |
| The variant table | Colour names and sizes are the seller's own words, and they are what the order form will ask you to repeat exactly. |
| Quantity in stock on the variant you want | Stock is per variant. A listing with stock can still be out of the one colour you chose. |
| Review photographs rather than review counts | Counts are cheap. A photograph taken in a stranger's room is the only part of a review that is hard to manufacture. |
| The same picture on other shops | Shared images are normal and mean nothing about quality. They do mean the picture tells you nothing about this shop. |
| Shop badges and self-declared grades | Noise. These are marketing labels, not platform guarantees. |
Item level
Decisions that are cheaper before the order
Judging a listing before you order comes down to three decisions. All three are free up front and expensive afterwards, because once an item is bought every problem with it costs either a return window or an argument.
Pick the variant on the listing, not in the message. The order form has a Color Classification field and a Message field, and only the first one is structured. Anything that matters belongs in the structured field.
Decide about seals before you buy, not after. Sealed cosmetics, fragrance, hair and skin care, essential oils: these are returnable only while the seal is unbroken. If the reason you want it is to try it, the return was never available to you, and the honest version of that decision is made at the checkout rather than at the parcel.
Count the books. Fifteen or more books in one order is an excluded category on its own, which is the kind of threshold nobody discovers until they are over it.
Before you pay
Five things worth a second look
Ordered by how often each one actually goes wrong rather than by how serious it sounds.
The variant, spelled the seller's way
Copy the colour name from the listing rather than describing it. A translated colour name and the seller's own are frequently different words for different variants.
Whether it is liftable
Essential oils, care solutions, lubricants, batteries and glue can be removed from a parcel before it ships, with your consent deemed given. If one of those is the whole reason for the order, it travels alone or not at all.
Whether you are adding to a waiting parcel
One more seller is one more delay for everything already in the warehouse. Return budget turns that into a count of windows rather than a feeling.
What goes in the message field
Short sentences, one instruction each. A person reads it, a person who is handling many orders, and a paragraph of conditions is less likely to be followed than two lines.
Whether the balance covers a return
A return needs the freight and the fee available at the moment you apply. Spending the balance down to zero on freight is what turns an open window into a closed one.
Questions
Asked while a cart is open
How do I tell where a shop ships from?
The listing's shipping section names the origin, and it is one of the few fields machine translation handles reliably. It matters because goods from outside mainland China are an excluded category, so the guarantee never applies to them.
Are high review counts worth anything?
Less than photographs inside the reviews. A count is easy to accumulate; a stranger's photograph of the item in daylight is not. Read four of those instead of the number.
Can I ask the agent which seller is better?
They buy what you link to. The service is entrusted purchasing, which means the choice of seller is yours and the consequences of it are too.
Does buying several items from one seller help?
It helps the arrival dates cluster, which is the one thing that genuinely reduces what consolidating costs you. The windows still run per order, but they run closer together. One parcel has the arithmetic.
Next
Once the order is placed
Check-in comes next, and it is the moment that starts both the photographs and the clock start. Inspection covers reading the first, and return budget covers the second.
If you have not opened an account yet, you can do that with the agent; the links on this site carry a referral code, which is disclosed at the bottom of every page.
