Taobao Field Guide » How to use Taobao

Buying From Outside of China?

The Field Guide — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:06:14 +0000

How to Buy from Taobao

The Field Guide — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:39:25 +0000

This is the quick and dirty guide – it presents the fastest, easiest way to buy stuff on Taobao. If you need more detail on any of these steps, links are provided to guides that go in depth into these points.

First things First

If you don’t live in China, you will need to check out our guide to buying on Taobao from overseas. If you do live in China, be sure to sign up for Taobao and add money to your account. When that is done, you are ready to start shopping with the guide below.

Step 1. Search in English

Yes, just type in English! You will find the stuff you want 95% of the time.

More search tips:

Guide to Taobao Search

How to find the best price that is nearest to you

2. Check the Seller Feedback

Scroll down into your results and click on the products that look good. On the product page, look here and make sure that the Seller is highly rated. A good rule of thumb is at least 99% feedback on more than 500 transactions. (In the image below, the seller has 99.44% feedback on 716 transactions.) More on Evaluating a Seller

3. Click the Orange Buy It Now! Button

As seen above. There is now also a Blue Shopping Cart button which is useful if you are buying multiple things at once.

4. Add a Shipping Address

Click the button circled in green below to enter your shipping

address. Use Chinese for the street address if you can, but English (pinyin) is okay here too.

5. Choose Shipping method

Kuaidi 快递 is usually the preferred option — a delivery person will come to your door with the package. For details on the alternatives, check out our detailed guide to buying.

6. Submit your order

As seen above.

7. Enter your password to confirm payment

If you have a question about this step, check our guide to paying for your Taobao order.

You’re done!

Sit back and wait for your package to arrive. When it does, you should check out our Guide to Receiving Stuff. … if you’re not too busy playing with your new treasure.

Sign Up for a Taobao Account

The Field Guide — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 12:18:19 +0000

Registration Takes Less than a Minute

If you have ever signed up for anything online, the Taobao registration process will be very familiar. All you need is a username, a password and an e-mail address. Start by going to the Taobao registration page.

Enter your information as indicated by my green hints:

A couple quick tips:

Choose a good password, with a number and a symbol. Otherwise Taobao will nag you about having a crappy password every time you log in. Also, when choosing which email address to use, keep in mind that Taobao will send you some emails whenever you buy something.

Step 1: Fill out your username and password. Hit the orange button.

Step 2: Fill out your email and Make sure you check the Box! Hit the orange button.

Step 3: It will ask for you to check your email, but if you hit the orange button it will send you to the email address you provided.

Time to Check Your Email

If you don’t see it right away, Check the junk message/spam folder!!! That’s where I found mine! Open the newly received e-mail and click the big fat orange “Confirm” button in the middle of the message.

Success!

You will be taken to a page confirming your successful registration. Congratulations! You are now the newest member of Taobao!

Mac Users: More info for you here~

Mac users interface might be a bit different from the guides about, since we don’t have a Mac, we’re unable to put up some screenshots. However, one of our kind reader – Master Arvey – generously shared some of his findings regarding to Taobao registration on Mac, as follows:

Mac users will encounter the following hiccup. When clicking on the
registration link, you will notice an orange field. This field tells
you to download a browser plugin and install it. The link below the
orange field will download that browser plugin. Once you open up the
disk image and double-click the installer, it should guide you through
the installation process. It installs a browser plugin called
“aliedit.webplugin” into the /Library/Internet Plug-ins/ directory.
The other catch is that this browser plugin only works for Webkit-
based browsers. In non-geek speak, this means that Firefox won’t work;
only Safari and Webkit-based browsers like Omniweb will work with
Taobao.

(As a sidenote, it seems that this plugin is used for encrypting
transactions. I analyzed the plugin and found that it made some
decryption/encryption calls, but I don’t really know exactly what it’s
doing. Someone with more computer hacking skillz could do better
analysis using tcpdump or similar tools. Furthermore, there is also no
guarantee that this plugin itself is secure. All I know is that Taobao
requires it for Mac users.)

After installing the plugin, restart your Webkit-based browser and the
rest of the instructions should apply.

Thank you so much Master Arvey!!! =)

Next Step

But before you can start buying things, you will need to add money to your account. That means a trip to your local China Post Office to buy a Taobao Recharge Card.