Tips on Select Best Seller on Taobao

Taobao, established by Ma Yun in 2003, a man with wildest ambition in ecommerce and also the founder of Alibaba. At the beginning, Ebay was supreme in everything over Taobao and Ebay considered Taobao to be nothing. Ebay charged certain amount service fee in listing and selling out products while Taobao made it totally free. It’s in the backbone that Chinese netizens believe internet is the place for free resource and they don’t have habit to pay for anything out there in the internet. Taobao the very local enterprise with very local ideology read this well provided marketplace serve totally free. No matter how hard Ebay blocked all the possible channel that Taobao promoted in, Taobao beat Ebay to be the biggest online marketplace in 2004. 3 year later in 2007, Ebay China changed their language to traditional Chinese overnight, which signified Ebay withdrew out from China.

Most people show interesting on taobao and want to shop on it, especially on 2014. So, how to seclect a good seller is an improtant course. Follow is some skill for how to select best seller:

In Ebay, we have FIXED price and AUCTION price. But in Taobao, we only have FIXED price. Every item sold in Taobao is listed at a fixed price but this does not necessarily mean you cannot bargain with the sellers. It takes skill and patience when bargaining with sellers and it’s not always working, some seller refuse to bargain.There are two types of store in Taobao: one is Tmall run by registered corporations, the other is C store run by individuals.

How to select the right seller?

It seems Taobao is a good place to shop from. Which kinds of products worth buying and how to select the good buyer? The below suggestions are for your reference.

Review the feedback of sellers

There’re three types of feedback left for each item sold by seller.

Positive: 4-5 stars
Neutral: 3 stars
Negative: 1-2 stars

For most of the case the more positive feedbacks the better the item/seller should be. But sometimes we need to take a deep look at the quality of the positive feedbacks. Back in 2009, the Taobao rules in feedback are not as strict as now. Many sellers increase their positive feedback by cheating. They simply hire someone to virtually buy their items but without actual offline transaction. Today this kind of cases is absolutely again the rules, but higher level cheating on positive feedback still exist. We would better pay attention to who and when the positive feedbacks are left by.

Review the Detailed Seller Ratings Score

If you shop on Ebay, you know what Detailed Seller Ratings is and in Taobao, they have the same rating as picture shown below. Feedback and Detailed Seller Ratings Score are objective index that you can check directly on each seller’s store. No one can guarantee their reliability and they’re just for reference only. And for C store, you can choose the ones with high credit scores.

Check the quality of the picture shootings

It comes very natural that good picture will persuade shoppers to purchase more easily. But you need to make sure that the pictures are really shoot from their products. For most of the cases, small or amateur sellers (remember every Chinese citizen can open store in Taobao), they don’t have the time and money to do the professional product shooting. So they steal high quality commercial picture from other and modify the all the branding information to their own by Photoshop. If you buy from this kind of sellers, it might be at high risk that the products are not as good as you see in their stores pictures. Many store owners in Taobao realize the importance of their original pictures and put watermark in them. It gets harder and harder to modify the branding information. So if you find the shooting style of the picture not consistent with each other or different logo with their store, you can say the picture are stolen from others.

Don’t believe Unreasonable cheap price

Many people come to Taobao is because of cheaper price. But how cheap should it be? Copyright in Taobao is a serious question. For many international brand products sold in Taobao are not authorized to do so by the official company. So think twice if you can buy a LV handbag just for several hundred RMB.

How for the foreigners outside China to shop in Taobao?

1.Shop by yourself, you can learn from this article:
How to buy from Taobao
How To Shop From China Platform

2.Choose the Taobao agent, here is some article can help you:
How To Choose The Right Taobao Agent

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 06/10/2014 - 12:30am.
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