Where to start, depending on where you are
You have never ordered through an agent
Read how to buy from Taobao first. It covers the whole sequence and, more usefully, the three costs that are not the item price — the agent's exchange rate, international freight, and import charges at your border. Those three routinely add more than the goods themselves on a small order, and the shape of that surprises people.
You have a spreadsheet full of links
If any of them point at PandaBuy or WeGoBuy, read the dead links page before you write the sheet off. Both agents are gone but the product IDs inside their URLs are still valid, and the converter rebuilds them against agents still trading.
You are choosing between agents
The agent comparison has the sourced numbers, and the fee calculator runs them against your basket. The short version is that six of the eight verified agents charge nothing up front, so the fee is not what should decide it.
You have an order at the warehouse
Go to the QC checklist. This is the last stage where a problem costs you domestic return shipping rather than international freight, and it is worth ten minutes.
You are about to ship
The shipping calculator, and specifically the box dimension fields. Volumetric weight catches more people than every other cost on this site combined.
The five things worth knowing before anything else
If you read nothing else on this site, these are the points that change outcomes. Each is covered properly on its own page; this is the compressed version.
Volumetric weight decides your shipping bill, not the scale
Carriers charge on length × width × height ÷ 6000 whenever that exceeds actual weight. Four pairs of sneakers in their boxes is roughly 40×30×20 cm — 4 kg volumetric against about 1.8 kg actual. Asking the agent to remove the boxes and vacuum-pack is free, takes one message, and roughly halves the billed weight. It is the largest avoidable cost in the entire process and almost nobody asks for it.
A 0% fee is not a free agent
Six of the eight agents with verified rates charge nothing on the order. The margin moved to the exchange rate applied when your payment is converted to yuan, and to the markup on the shipping quote they resell you. Both are larger than the service fees they replaced, and neither appears as a line item anywhere.
Review count matters more than review score
The Trustpilot scores across the main agents span 2.5 to 4.7, but the samples behind them span 74 reviews to 13,300. A 4.2 across 13,300 buyers has converged. A 2.5 across 74 has not, and could move a full point on one bad quarter. Read the count first.
QC is the last cheap decision
Rejecting an item at the warehouse costs domestic Chinese return shipping — a few dollars. Rejecting it after international freight costs more than most items are worth. The most common fault is a warehouse pick error, visible in twenty seconds by comparing the size stamp against the box label, and most buyers never look.
Measure your foot in millimetres
UK, US and EU sizing are built on different units from different zero points, so every conversion rounds and the errors compound. Going UK to US to EU to a Chinese listing can drift a full size. Measure once in millimetres — which is what the factory works to — and send that number to the seller instead of a size.
What is missing, and why
There are no individual agent review pages here yet. Writing eight of them would be easy and most of them would be padding, because the honest comparison fits in one table — which is what the comparison page is. They will get written when there is something specific to say about a given agent that does not fit there.
There is also no page telling you which "batch" to buy. Batch terminology is not standardised, two sellers using the same phrase ship different things, and any page ranking them confidently is guessing. The QC page covers the part that is actually decidable: how to judge the item in front of you from the photos.
And there is no customs page. Import thresholds change with policy — the treatment of low-value parcels from China into the United States has moved more than once in the last two years alone — so a page stating them confidently would be wrong within months. The shipping calculator flags where charges apply and points you at your own customs authority for the current figure, which is the only version of that advice that stays true.