Buying advice for the UIDBuy Spreadsheet

Five skills that matter more than any single listing: vetting a seller, reading a listing, judging the agent, judging the spreadsheet you found it on, and avoiding the usual mistakes.

Sizing up a Taobao or 1688 store first

Here is how to vet a seller on Taobao, Weidian or 1688 when you cannot read Chinese easily. Start with the store, not the item: how long it has been open, how many items it lists, whether those items look like one kind of business or a random mix. A store selling forty variations of one product type is usually a maker or a specialist. A store selling phones, perfume and puffer jackets side by side is usually a reseller with less control over quality.

UIDBuy's own search results can be sorted by price, sales and repurchase rate. Repurchase rate is the most telling of the three: people rarely go back to a store that disappointed them. Then read the listing's review photos rather than the stars, and look for buyers who posted measurements.

Option menus, borrowed photos and too-good prices

For how to pick an item from a listing, read the option menu before anything else. The headline price usually belongs to the cheapest option, which may be a single piece from a set, a small size, or an accessory. Option names are often in Chinese, sometimes just numbers, and their order does not always match the photos. If you are unsure which option is which, ask in the order remark and let the purchaser confirm with the seller.

Next, separate the seller's own photos from borrowed ones. Studio shots on a white background with no store watermark are often borrowed; photos on a carpet, a hanger rail or a shop floor are more likely the real stock. Last, check the price against a few similar listings. A price far below the rest is a question to ask, not a bargain to grab.

Holding UIDBuy, or any agent, to a written standard

A trustworthy agent tells you, in writing and before you pay, what it charges, how long it stores your goods, what its inspection covers, what it pays when a parcel is lost or late, and which company you are contracting with. UIDBuy answers most of those in its help center. It gets weaker on the last point and on fees, where its own pages disagree, as our About UIDBuy and fees pages show.

Two practical tests apply to any agent. Send a small first purchase and see how the warehouse handles it: photo quality, how fast questions are answered, whether the remark was followed. And read the compensation rules for lost and damaged parcels before you ship anything valuable; UIDBuy has separate standards for insured and uninsured parcels.

Putting spreadsheet sites through four honest checks

If you are wondering how to judge any spreadsheet site you land on, ask four things. Does it date its information, so you can tell a fresh price from a year-old one? Do its links still work, or do half the shelves end on removed listings? Does it say what it cannot check, or does every item come with the same confident blurb? And does it name the people behind it and say where its money comes from?

Hold us to the same test. Each figure here is stamped with the day we looked it up, the sample listings were checked on October 23, 2026, the about page says who writes here, and we earn nothing from UIDBuy sign-ups. If a link of ours is dead or a fact is stale, the correction address is in the footer.

Mistakes that cost new buyers money

Most early losses come from a short list. Paying for the headline price and getting the cheapest option. Ordering by letter size without asking for centimetres. Buying a bottle or a battery item before checking which lines will carry it. Letting items sit in the warehouse until the oldest one nears its free storage limit. Shipping a box of shoes in their original cartons and paying for air. Declaring a value that does not match the contents.

And one that has nothing to do with UIDBuy: buying on impulse because the price in yuan looks small. Before you pay, add the domestic delivery, a fair share of the international freight and any duty your country charges. The item that looked cheap is often still cheap; sometimes it is not.