Find and choose items on taobao.com

Finding and choosing items on Taobao.com is one of the main points of the buying process. Your choice of item will influence not only the speed of your order processing, but also your satisfaction when you receive it.

About Taobao search you can look at “How to Search Taobao” page.

Below we will mostly explain how to choose the right seller and item:

a) choose the seller / taobao store: To choose the item, first of all, you need to pay attention to Taobao sellers. There is the rating for Taobao sellers, which is based on sales volume, items quality and customer service. Most important is the sales volume, which is visually represented by hearts, crystals and crowns. Then, below sales volume there is another interesting information: percent of positive reviews.

When selecting item, please choose sellers with at least one crystal or above (3-5 crystals is good, crown or several crowns is very good).

The number of positive feedback should not be below 98%.

Where to check this information? On the item page, the name of the seller may be displayed at the top of the page or to the right or left of the main item image.

Usually each Taobao seller has a shop. To see other items from this seller, you can click on the first button (written 首页 in chinese) in the horizontal menu on the item page – which will take you to the home page of this seller’s Taobao store.

b) Availability of stock. Most of sellers on Taobao.com are private individuals or agents of various factories. For this reason, availability of items in stock is not always updated, information about seller’s stock is often inaccurate or incorrect. There are two possible explanations:

– some Taobao sellers start to get stock only after receiving order (i.e. seller will purchase items only after an order is received online at the store on taobao.com)

– most of sellers intentionally display a large quantity of items available in stock, so they are always displayed in search results on taobao.com (if the seller set item as out of stock, then this item will disappear from search results on taobao, so it would decrease the number of visitors to seller’s store, and therefore less potential customers).

If you placed an order for item which is not be available, we will cancel it, then in your order you can submit another item for purchase from a different seller.

So how to know whether items are available?
It is impossible to make sure whether item is available or not; in fact, sometimes even the seller does not know in advance if item is available. So, basically, you can really know only after you buy it.

Though there are some details that may indicate if item is in stock.

First, sellers with higher rating are more likely to have items available in stock. Sellers with high ratings often have their own warehouse and can provide more accurate information about inventory.

Second, it is better to choose the item which was sold at least few times over the last month. If there are no sales – it is most likely that item is not available. You also need to pay attention to the fact that items with high volume of sales also may be sold out and new stock did not arrive yet.

Third, on the item page near the main photo there should not be the following statement: 宝贝 下 架 – this indicates that the item is not available.


Now let’s learn how to choose correct item parameters.