Taobao English Guide

Taobao in English? Well, almost.

There are many Taobao English guides around the web. We’ve made our own guide in English. If you look for explanation about how to use Taobao, search and find items on Taobao.com, then you came to the right place.

“I want to know how to use taobao!”

In order to make it clear for you, we’ve made a short Taobao English Guide.
Click below to start:

Step 1. Get to know taobao: Homepage, search functions, Taobao main navigation
Step 2. Search an item on taobao: translation, Taobao.com search, search results
Step 3. Item page: Taobao.com item description, details

Taobao shopping
It is important to make the right choice for articles you want to buy: Taobao agent service will be faster if you provide clear information for your order. Please consider our quick Taobao.com tips:

• Search Chinese websites only in Chinese language. Search in English will give you less results and often higher prices than average.

• Take your time to discover and compare products, don’t buy the first thing you see.

• It is important to check the seller’s feedback and product selling history. It happens that the seller has a good reputation with lots of sales, but probably the shop is selling a lot of cheap products of the same type and it is different from what you want to buy. For example, you are looking to buy shoes from Taobao shop, you see that the seller reputation is of somewhat 99% positive feedback and more than 10000 transactions. Then you should check what are the items sold the most frequently, maybe you will see that this seller is giving away hundreds of t-shirts a day and has not much choice and sales in shoes – we would not suggest to buy it from such seller.

• It is better to choose the items with detailed and clear description. It is important that you understand the description, if you have any doubt, better contact Taobao agent for help with English translation.

• Try to search the same item in several categories. Taobao has many different categories and many items are not submitted to the right category. So if you can’t find what you are looking for, try to see in other similar categories using our Taobao English Categories or directly on Taobao.com in Chinese.

• Be aware of items with price from 1 to 10 yuan as well as of domestic shipping more than 40 yuan. Unless you are buying a very small thing, such prices are put for advertisement purpose to attract buyers, but usually it is not a real price. Often the above item is not available and the seller would suggest other product for higher price. Do not make illusions about low prices.

• Many Taobao shops are the copies of other real (original) shops, probably the only difference in products is the price. We suggest you to try search for keywords from product description in Chinese and check the results.

• If you buy clothes from Taobao, you should check carefully the product description: if the clothes are not of standard size, often the sellers will write if it is actually bigger or smaller than usual international size. You should know that clothes sizes sold in China’s Taobao may vary from standard sizes. Remind again: if English translation of Taobao is not clear enough, you should ask Taobao agent for help to explain the details of offer.