Back in 2013, I researched online for my family’s move to Beijing. I came across Taobao.com and bj.56.com. I already had my apartment picked and all my future purchases decided. The guy assigned to help us with the transition nearly choked on his noodles when I told him my plans. He let me down gently.

Though I chucked 56 hoaxes, I waded through fake and real Taobao products because it really was the best solution for me to shop in China on a budget. My toddlers hated shopping with me and I hated shopping with them, since every beautiful thing is set right at their eye level in markets.

I was known as the Taobao queen, finding things on the site that even my Chinese friends couldn’t find. I once held a workshop at my former school to train other teachers in setting up their Alipay. Then last year my foreign friend wanted me to pay for his rent using my account. Long story short, my Alipay got messed up, and I haven’t bothered with fixing the blasted payment platform. I resigned to using JD.com. Though I found it much more convenient since it allowed WeChat Wallet, I didn’t like the prices.

Then this year, everyone started talking about Baopals.com. JD had become a habit, but finally I decided I was going to put aside my trauma of losing Taobao and plunge into setting up yet another platform for shopping.

To my delight, setting up Baopals was super easy. I mean, shouldn’t it be? It’s all in English. And they accept WeChat Wallet. The glory of those cheap prices came sliding back… Quick! someone lock my WeChat Wallet before I black out from shopping addiction…

I was curious about who came up with the awesomeness of Baopals and decided to reach out for an interview. Sure, Baopals isn’t new news for everyone, but do you know much about the men behind the site? No, I think not.

Two of the three founders made the mistake of adding me on WeChat prior to the interview [insert evil laugh here], so I scooped out their personalities on their moments. I ambushed them with some pretty cheeky interview questions. Many thanks for playing along, Jay Thornhill and Charlie Erikson!

What would be the Baopals theme song?
Jay: “The bananaphone song. We play music while we work, and when the bananaphone song comes on, it’s a time for us to goof around. We don’t dance, but we should. We’re constantly communicating with someone, whether its sellers or consumers, our phones just – ring, ring.”

Which super power would Charlie most benefit from?
Jay: “I wouldn’t want to indicate Charlie is lacking from anything. I guess the ability to handle a thousand things at one time, or maybe to hold five conversations at once.”

Charlie: “That’s not really a super power, that’s more of a mutation.”

(I interjected to say it’s OK, it fits with X-Men.)

Jay: “Ok, five mouths to hold five conversations. We oversee lots of different things we need to handle. Someone is always constantly asking us a question. So I think best to have five mouths to hold five different conversations at one time.”

What’s the oddest behavior you’ve caught Jay doing at the office?
Charlie: “What’s the oddest behavior I’ve caught Jay doing? Well, our office used to be in my apartment, so home and work life often mixed. Some of us lived in the office. In that sense…”

Jay: “Hey! This is a kid’s magazine.”

Charlie: “One time a neighbor came over to use our showers after their hot water ran out. The neighbor was leaving right as staff were arriving, and that was pretty awkward for everyone involved.”

Who’s better at Chinese?
Jay: “Definitely Charlie. I plateaued in 2008 and now I just run on survival Chinese.”

Charlie: “My mom is Taiwanese and my dad is a translator. I was at decent level in a the US. [I came to China because] I wanted to improve. My mom would say, ‘You’re my son and you can’t even understand what I’m saying?!'”

What’s Charlie’s biggest pet peeve in the office?
Jay: “Well, does it have to be in the office? We all know each other really well and are great friends, and our other co-founder, Tyler and Charlie are the same height, so they often share clothes. I’m shorter than them, so no one can borrow my things. Much of our stuff has become communal and free.”

Charlie: “Which means I own all the clothes and Tyler doesn’t own anything.”

Jay: “They had this resolution where they went on Baopals and bought 30 pairs of socks, all the same color and style.”

If I were interviewing your dog, Doge (pronounced DOH-j) what secrets would he tell me about Jay?
Charlie: “He spends too much time on OK Cupid.”

Jay: “But I really don’t!”

What are the Baopal office rumors about Charlie?
Jay: “Well, I think Charlie is comfortable with me sharing this, but there was a rumor that he was bisexual, though he is actually heterosexual. But we did not confirm or squash those rumors. It’s probably because Tyler shows up in his clothes.”

Who picked out the matching suits at the recent award ceremony in Shanghai?
Charlie: Both of us came up with it. Often what happens is that we’re taking branding to a level it shouldn’t and then we’re already there. One of us will say, ‘You’re not going to back out, well I’m not either.'”

If Jay could be anyone in the world, who would he be and why?
Charlie: “Clearly me, if it wasn’t me, maybe an NBA player.”

Confession time: how many of the crazy Baopal finds have either one of you actually purchased?
Jay: “We’ve bought the dog wigs, the lion mane, and the boyfriend pillow. That was a gift for a girl. We actually started a Tinder campaign using the boyfriend window and quickly got banned from the site. We’ve also bought the magic wine and the Death Star for ants, but typically we buy the cool stuff more often than the crazy.”

Check out more about Baopals on their website or through their official WeChat account.

More stories by this author here.
Email: vanessajencks@truerun.com
Twitter: @vanessa_jencks
WeChat: vanessajencks

If you need help with setting up a Taobao account, setting up WeChat pay on Taobao, or payment options in general, visit our previous posts for step-by-step how to guides!

The key to navigating Taobao is language skills.  I’d love to delve more into this, but I’m too illiterate in Chinese to make claims here.  But how did I learn to navigate Taobao without the ability to read Chinese characters? Well, I joined taobao when Google Translate was still a possibility in China and translated entire pages until I didn’t need to anymore (that’s how much time I spent on the site).  Unfortunately, even with VPN, translating the entire site with Google Translate is no longer an option. So instead, I’ve listed a few tips and tricks that continue to help me in my Taobao searches:

• Type in pinyin, not English.

When you look for items in English, you’ll get the laowai huo (foreigner stock) and laowai jia ge (foreigner price rank). I can tell you from experience that the price difference is at least double, depending on what you’re searching for.  Back in the day, they didn’t even have items listed in English, but now with world.taobao.com and other international channels, business savvy sellers have understood that they can earn more money by selling to foreigners and utilizing their English skills.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually need to know the characters for items to find them on Taobao; you just need to know the pinyin.  Since my oral Mandarin is alright, I usually just ask someone, how do you say ‘humidifier’ in Chinese?  Then, I’ll type in jia shi qi and the characters will automatically pop up. Choosing the correct set of characters from the large number of suggestions is probably the most challenging part, but when in doubt, you can always not choose any and go with pure pinyin.

Of course, if you want to be absolutely sure, you can go on Baidu Fanyi or Google Translate and get both the characters and the pinyin for your search!

• Use key terms in your search

If you’ve ever been a fan of Ebay (I was back home), you’ll know that there’s more to a product listing title than just the brand or name of the good.  By looking for key terms, you can narrow down your search significantly without being too specific—why don’t you want to be specific on Taobao? Because specific searches will give you specific prices! Shop like a local and avoid the specifics.

Here is a list of key terms that I use in my searches:

Overseas              海外       haiwai

Typing “overseas” will narrow your search down to imports and exports.

Export                   出口      chukou

Adding chukou to your search, or even searching it on its own, will give you an idea of all the foreign brands that are available to you (at a lower price).

Import                  进口      jingkou

Keep in mind that jingkou is less often used for clothing and accessories, and more commonly used to label import food and cosmetics.

Foreign trade     外贸      waimao

Adding waimao to your search will ensure that the products are meant for the foreign market (rather than domestic), and are “export goods”. If you’re really picky, you can even add a country in front of waimao:

American Foreign Trade                                美国外贸            meiguowaimao

Japanese Foreign Trade                                日本外贸            ribenwaimao

Finnish Foreign Trade                                    芬兰外贸            fenlanwaimao 

British Foreign Trade                                     英国外贸             yingguowaimao

European Foreign Trade                                欧洲外贸            ouzhouwaimao

I highly recommend adding a specific country if you prefer the size chart of a specific country or if you’re looking for a brand “from” a certain country.

Keep in mind that since many foreign brands have not entered the Chinese market (again, “foreign trade” means it’s for export) so the sellers will not list the brand in their title. Instead, they’ll just write a vague description and you’ll have to click in to recognize the brand yourself.  Such listings will have cheaper prices and will almost always be extra stock directly from the factory or wholesaler. Sometimes they will be second or third quality (check the pictures carefully).

• Use the asterisk

The asterisk functions like a joker in search boxes and can be used instead of a letter in a search term, such as “un*qlo” or as a means to break up a word into parts “gue*ss”.  The asterisk is most useful in searching for brands that are well-known in China, as in brands with their own flagship stores, since there will be more of those items listed and the asterisk is a good way of weeding out the fake products.

Sample search: Carter’s

One of the problems with using an asterisk is that you might get a random assortment of results that match a “part” of your search term. To solve this, click on a category (recognize宝宝 baobao, which means “baby”):

Personally, if there are many results, I like to sort them from lowest priced to highest priced:

Here’s what we’ll end up with:

Hopefully that was helpful to you! Just remember, whatever you do, don’t search for “baby”!  I had realized when I was google translating Taobao that the word for product or “goods” was translated as “baby”. In addition, Chinese seem to use “baby” for a lot of products that have nothing to do with children.

China has over 150 online shopping retailers, some we’ve written about before, and others we will be writing about later (shopping for kids, groceries, etc.). When you’re tired of browsing Taobao, here’s nine legit websites that sell a wide variety of items for you to choose from. Don’t forget, if you get their apps, you’ll instantly save money!

ETAO.COM 一淘

Etao is actually not an online shopping site, but an online-shopping search engine run by Alibaba.  For those unfamiliar with the service, an online-shopping search engine is basically a price and availability comparison tool. Etao includes items from foreign shopping websites as well as brick-and-mortar stores. It also finds you “special offers” on groupon type websites.

For example, if I want to find a pair of Adidas Los Angeles sneakers, I can type in the search box, narrow down my price range, and then I can even see how the price has changed over the past few weeks (to decide if I should wait longer before purchasing). From my search, I see that the price has dropped from RMB 550 to RMB 349 in less than a month!  All in all, a service worth testing out

DANGDANG.COM 当当

Dangdang started out in 1999 as the largest online bookstore in China, providing over 600,000 Chinese books.  As with most online retailers, DangDang has also branched out to sell other products, such as home appliances, clothing, tech, and anything a mother might want to buy (e.g. baby and kid stuff).

It should be noted that DangDang was in the news in 2014 for poor seller requirements, having been discovered by CCTV news.  A Beijinger had purchased all his Estee Lauder, Calvin Klein, and other cosmetics from the local Beijing wholesale market, Tianzhaotian and made a small fortune.  Of course, DangDang took precautions and removed quite a few of its stores following the scandal, but perhaps the store is better suited for buying what it was originally meant to sell: books.

Specialties:

Books, audio (music) and visual (DVD) products

Payment methods:

Cash on delivery, money transfer, online payments (Union Pay online payment, 99bill, Alipay, WeChat Pay, Pay Ease, net banking), and gift cards

NEWEGG.CN

Newegg, the second-largest online-only retailer in the US, launched its Chinese e-commerce website in 2010. It advertises itself as “foreign direct purchase”, which means that goods are directly shipped from “foreign” warehouses. Newegg also advertises a superior shopping experience for consumers, rapid delivery, and stellar customer service.

Newegg is typically known for its “geeky” electronics in the US, selling PC components, hard-to-find PC, tech, and other gaming gear and accessories, and better-than-Best-Buy prices for electronics. In China, it also sells computer parts and accessories, electronics, cell phones, and other high-tech products. However, it has branched out to include more household appliances and baby gear.

Yes, baby gear, including products targeting mothers: baby clothes, children’s toys, car seats, strollers, and infant formula.

Specialties:

It features cell phones, computers, household appliance, and other high-tech products.

Payment methods:

Cash on delivery, online payment (bank payments, Unionpay, Alipay, Yeepay, Sumpay, Yingdian Life Card, Tenpay), quick payment, bank wire transfer.

YOU.163.COM 严选

Yan Xuan, which translates to “picks” or “selection”, is a NetEase lifestyle online retailer similar to its RMB1 groupon-like shopping platform.  It has a pleasant, clean design and only sells well-known foreign brands of a certain quality.  Certain products of a few well-known brands include: Carter’s (only the natural line), Muji, and Coach (only leather items). For said products, if they are available in China, they’re sold at a lower price.
Yan Xuan advertises itself as a filter that chooses high-quality products for the sake of the consumer. They select goods with high-quality raw materials, natural materials, low to no formaldehyde (toxic pollutant), made with imported technology (even if domestically made), and guaranteed authenticity. All the products sold on the site are approved by third-party testers: SGS, BV, ITS TOP.

Specialties:

Natural products under the categories of: home, clothing (including maternity), kids’ clothing, accessories (including pollution masks), and food (Muji-style snacks, teas, herbs).

Payment methods:

Credit cards, Alipay, WeChat Pay, Union Pay

YIHAODIAN.COM / SAM’S CLUB

Yihaodian (YHD) translates to “Number One Store”, and it truly strives to be the first with its comprehensive selection of, well, everything.  In addition to the typical items you might normally pick up at a grocery store, YHD also has mobile phones, cameras, computers, and other household electronics. Its selection is similar to Carrefour’s, just online, and ships free to your home with any purchase over RMB 68.

What makes YHD special is its cooperation with Sam’s Club (owned by Wal-Mart), the US wholesale/warehouse super store (similar to Costco).  For RMB 260 a year, you can buy a Sam’s Club Membership, which is valid in-store (Shijingshan, Yizhuang) and online. The YHD outlet for Sam’s Club has special offers for their 3,500 food import products, and is also accessible via the YHD app.

Specialties:

Food, beverages, household products

Payment methods:

Cash on delivery, online payments (bank, union pay, 99bill, Alipay), bank transfer, gift cards, and other payments.

JUMEI.COM 聚美优品

Jumei literally translates to “super beauty” or “super beautiful”, and carries exactly what you would expect from its name. Primarily, Jumei is visited for its beauty products, including cosmetics and makeup. If you click on their beauty products drop down menu, you’ll find a really narrow categorization to help you instantly find what you’re looking for. For example, you can look under Skincare and click on “eyeliner pencil” without having to do a search or load any other pages.

In addition to beauty products, Jumei also features clothing, fitness products, shoes, bags, and accessories. Jumei also has a selection of men’s products.

Jumei trades publicly in the US market and is thus considered the most reliable online retailer for US beauty products.  They have a 30 day return policy, fast delivery (free if total purchase over RMB 159), and a guarantee that your order will leave its warehouse within 1.5 hours after order processing.

Specialties:

Foreign brands, such as: Lancome, Clarins, Clinique, Elizabeth Arden, Estee Lauder, L’oreal, Laneige, SK-II, Avene, Innisfree

Payment methods:

Online banking, payment upon arrival of goods, and Alipay

AMAZON.CN

Before Amazon came to China, there was a Chinese version of Amazon called Joyo. Basically, Amazon in China is the same as Amazon in the rest of the world, with its major categories being: imported goods, fashion, books, electronics, gifts, household products, children’s stuff, and kindles.

The best thing about the Amazon website is that you can change the interface to English, but unfortunately the product titles and descriptions, the majority of links, and the details will all still be in Chinese.

Specialties:

Import goods, kindles, lightning deals

Payment methods:

Amazon pay, pay on delivery, Amazon account (prepaid, Paypal, credit/debit cards, gift cards), online payments (Alipay, Tenpay, net banking)

TMALL.COM天猫

If you’ve heard of Taobao, you’ve probably heard of Tmall (called “sky cat” since 2012) as well. Tmall is the more “legit” version of Taobao under Alibaba.  What this means is that in order to register a flagship store on Tmall, a company has to have either a unique brand or be an official brand representative (with proper documentation), meet the minimum requirements, and have enough investment (let’s just say it’s a lot more than Taobao vendor requirements).  It’s probably one of the largest B2C platforms in China, with about 70,000 brands from over 50,000 vendors, including international brands such as Nike, Dell, Ray-Ban, Uniqlo.

Tmall also has a Hong Kong based international website for its foreign import goods that are stored in China’s free-trade zones. As expected, this site mostly features import cosmetics, beauty products, and baby items (e.g. baby formula).

Specialties:

International brand flagship stores, independent brand products

Payment methods:

Cash on delivery, Alipay, net banking, bank transfer, credit cards.

JD.COM

If you’ve been in China for a while, you’ll remember that Jing Dong (JD) used to be called 360buy with its own merchandise line.  JD operates with a similar model to Amazon in that it delivers goods directly from its warehouses to customers and doesn’t have a middle man.  JD is most often complimented for its incredibly fast delivery service (can be within hours) and its product reliability (genuine products).

What makes JD the most convenient shopping site in this list?  JD can also be found in your WeChat application under Me – Wallet – Scroll down to “Powered by third party operator” – Specials.

In addition, JD has a Hong Kong based website called JD Worldwide, which features international brands stored in a different set of warehouses located in China’s free-trade zones. For customers outside China and Hong Kong, JD has an all-English (and Russian) website called JoyBuy, which only accepts Paypal.

Specialties:

JD has categorized its website like a department store with a total of 11 floors, with the most notable being their electronics section:

1. Clothing, Shoes, Bags; 2. Toiletries, Cosmetics, Beauty products; 3. Mobile Phones; 4. Household Appliances; 5. Computer products; 6. Sports and Fitness; 7. Home Life; 8. Maternity, Children, Toys; 9. Health, Food; 10. Books, Music; 11. Car accessories and supplies

Payment methods:

Cash on delivery, online payment (WangYin, Union Pay, Alipay, WeChat Pay), installment, wire transfer, post office remittance

Photos: Jessica Suotmaa

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