It looks like Air Mail has become a much cheaper option than it was before. It used to be more expensive than EMS and DHL when the weight got higher, but now it seems to be the cheapest option up to 9kg. Any heavier and EMS is the cheapest option. Always check the calculation page to check for your best shipping rate.
Also, although the agent's fee is 10% of the item cost, they have a minimum of 35RMB on their commission fees.
Original post:
-----------------------------------------------
Since we can only have 10 urls in each post, I'm moving the original post to the 2nd page so that I can leave the illustrated tutorial here at the top. Hope some of you find it helpful! This tutorial assumes using Taobao Focus as an agent, but you could find another one if you like. You can click on the pictures to see them full sized and read them better.
I think here the cheapest I've seen brocades go are $15 a yard and some of the ones I really wanted were like $30 or so. On Taobao There are soooo many that are like $1.20-$3 a yard. There's also lots of gorgeous lace edging you can get cheap as well, whereas here it always seems to cost an arm and a leg...
Again, remember that Taobao is the Asian equivalent of ebay, but you can only buy directly on there if you are in Asia, so we need an agent to do the go-between work for us. This tutorial is using Taobao Focus because they are who I use and I've had good experiences with them.
First, don't forget, it's a lot easier to shop if you download Google Chrome and set it to automatically translate into English to browse http://www.taobao.com pages.
Here is an example of an item page, and the most important aspects of it:
That icon under the seller's name indicates a seller's status and volume based on this chart:
To find lace edging for sewing, I found i got much better results if I used google translate to put in the Chinese characters for lace instead of the word "lace" itself, so try this:
花边
It was the same thing with brocade. You get best results searching in Chinese:
锦缎
Here's the google translate page that you can use to translate things to and from Chinese:
http://translate.google.com/#en/zh-CN/
I don't know why, but some searches turn out much more accurately if you translate and then search with the Chinese characters. Not all searches though.
If you use Taobao Focus, you'll have to create an account on their page before continuing:
Once you find an item that you want, go to http://www.taobaofocus.com and go to your shopping cart and copy the item's page address into the preview field on your shopping card page:
Fill in any applicable information and add the item to your shopping card:
Once you have everything you want to buy listed, fill out your information and click "create" to submit your order:
Submit the first payment which includes everything but the final shipping cost for the full package to be sent from the Taobao Focus facility to you. Then just keep an eye on your order status and wait!
Once all the items from the sellers have arrived at Focus's facility, they take a picture of your order which you can view and then "Ok" before it gets sent to you. If there are any problems, TF will address those with the seller for you before you end up getting shipped any incorrect items. I can't remember at the moment, but I think you have to OK the order before they will ship it...
In my experience they mail you notifications on your order progress pretty well as compared to some other agencies that don't notify you at all.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Some things from the original post that are useful to keep in mind:
The translations aren't great, but they are good enough to get the gist of things. I haven't had any trouble buying so far. If you are buying cloth though, make sure to check to see if the pricing listed is per meter, or half meter, because the majority of shops seem to like to list price by 1/2 meter.
To check prices go to a currency converter like this: http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert/?Amount=1 ... CNY&To=USD
Prices on Taobao are listed in Chinese Yuan, so ignore any yen or dollar signs that you see.
right now 1 CNY = 0.157589 USD
This page helps you figure out what the final costs might be in the end, lets you look at the prospective costs of different shipping options:
http://taobaofocus.com/order/taobao-shi ... calculator
See the original post somewhere on the 2nd page to see some of the sellers I found that have good prices on lace and brocades.
