HTML Preview English Guide How To Buy On Taobao.com page number 3.
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Depending on what you’re looking for, you’ll see a variety of different filters to narrow down your
search. Below that are the product listings. This is where Chrome’s translation feature, despite the
awkward spacing and shoddy translation quality, can come in handy.
Tmall and Taobao items are listed together by default. For my purchase, I don’t want to risk getting a
fake, so I’m going to click on the Tmall tab at the top to further narrow my search (we’ll look at pages
from both sites, though). Tmall is generally more likely to sell genuine products than Taobao. The
payment process is the same for both.
Also keep an eye out for the credit card icon, indicating that the seller accepts credit card payments.
Almost all Tmall merchants accept it, but that’s not always the case on Taobao.
Taobao and Tmall product pages differ a bit, so we’ll start with Taobao. You can calculate shipping
costs by selecting your home province from a drop down menu just below the price. The right pane
contains important seller information, notably the merchant’s feedback rating and chat status.
That rating, which contains one to five icons, is based on the total amount of transactions that
received positive feedback. This is probably the most important indicator of the merchant’s reliability
and honesty. As a rule of thumb, gold crowns are legitimate shops and are perfectly safe to buy from.
Silver crowns can probably be trusted, too. Buy at your own risk from merchants with fewer than
four diamonds, and it’s probably best to avoid hearts altogether. Each icon is superior to five of the
lesser icon, so one diamond is better than five hearts, one silver crown is better than five diamonds,
and so on.
You’ll also see some numbers with arrows pointing up or down, but these can more or less be
ignored. They indicate delivery speed, seller attitude, and whether the seller’s items match the
descriptions. The arrow indicates if the positive feedback is above or below average.