How to buy from 1688

What you are actually doing

1688 is China's domestic wholesale site, and its prices are the ones Chinese buyers pay.

You are not going to check out on it. It wants a Chinese phone number, a Chinese bank account and a Chinese delivery address, and it ships inside China only.

What you are doing is finding the exact product and the exact seller, and handing that link to somebody in China who can buy it. Everything below is about finding the right link.

Search in Chinese, or you will see almost nothing

English search on 1688 returns a thin and strange selection. The site is written and indexed in Chinese, and so is every listing worth having.

So translate the product name first, then paste the Chinese into the search box. It is the single biggest difference between a useful hour on 1688 and a wasted one.

• Rechargeable fan: 充电风扇
• Solar panel: 太阳能板
• Generator: 发电机
• Human hair wig: 真人发假发
• Phone case: 手机壳
• Juicer: 榨汁机
• African wax print fabric: 非洲蜡染布
• Baby diapers: 婴儿纸尿裤

Check the Chinese word before you trust it

A translator will happily hand you a word that means something close, and not the thing. Search with it and you lose an hour looking at the wrong product.

Two checks, both quick. Translate the Chinese back into English and see whether it returns to where you started. Then look at the pictures the search brings back: if they are not your product, the word is wrong.

The best Chinese name is one you copied off a real listing. When you find a correct one, keep it. That word is worth money.

Search with a picture instead

There is a camera icon in the 1688 search box. Tap it, give it a photograph, and it finds the same product across thousands of listings.

This beats words for anything whose name you do not know, which is most things. A screenshot from WhatsApp works. So does a photo of the item on a plain background.

It is also how you find out what something really costs. Photograph a product you saw on Alibaba, search it on 1688, and the price often falls by more than half.

Translate the page, and know what translation gets wrong

Chrome and most phone browsers translate a 1688 page in one tap. It is good enough to move around with.

A few words carry money, and a machine renders them loosely. These are worth knowing in the original.

• 起批量: the smallest order the seller will take.
• 现货: in stock. 定制 means it is made to order, so add production time.
• 包邮: free delivery inside China only. It never means free to Nigeria.
• 件 and 个: one piece. 箱 is a carton, 套 is a set, 双 is a pair.
• 一件代发: the seller will post single items for you. That is a dropshipping service, not a wholesale price.
• 工厂 is a factory. 贸易 or 商贸 in the company name means a trading company.

Read the price properly

A 1688 listing shows tiers, not a price. Two or three rows, each with a quantity and a price, and the price falls as the quantity rises.

The number people quote at you is the cheapest tier, and that one usually needs hundreds of pieces. Your price is the tier your quantity actually lands in.

Check the minimum order in the same breath. Plenty of listings start at 2 or 10 pieces. Plenty start at 500.

What to write down before you close the page

Put all of it in one message. It is what anybody buying for you needs, and it is what you will want in a week when the listing has changed.

• The link.
• The price at your quantity, and which tier it came from.
• The smallest order the seller will take.
• The colour, size, model and voltage you want. Sellers put many versions on one page.
• The weight and the carton size, where the listing shows them. Freight is priced on those.
• How many you want.

Why asking in Chinese changes the price

The same seller quotes two different numbers for the same goods, and it is not only greed.

A message in English from outside China tells a seller several things at once. This order will probably be small. There will be questions about export they cannot answer. Something may come back as a complaint in three months. They price all of that in, or they do not reply at all.

The same question in Mandarin, in the format they read every day, is an ordinary domestic customer. That customer gets the tier price, gets told what is really in stock, and gets an answer the same afternoon.

It also decides what you can ask for. A sample at cost, a price held for a week, a small change to the packing, one order split across two colours. Those come out of a normal conversation, and a translated sentence does not have one.

Machine translation does not close the gap. It reads as translated immediately, which puts you straight back in the first group.

This is plainly an argument for using us, and it is also just true. You can test it yourself: ask a seller for a price in English, then have the same question asked in Mandarin, and compare the two replies.

What 1688 will not do for you

There is no export protection on a domestic order. The seller's job ends when the goods reach a Chinese address.

Quality runs from very cheap to genuinely good on the same page of search results, and the photographs do not tell you which is which. Somebody has to open the carton in China.

Nobody on that site will tell you your product needs SON or NAFDAC approval, or what duty it carries in Nigeria. That is your side of the work, and it is much cheaper to do before you order than after.

Send us the link

You need no Chinese bank account, no Chinese address and no Mandarin.

Send the link and say what you want, from the Requests tab in this app or on WhatsApp. We check the seller, ask the questions in Mandarin, buy the goods, inspect them at our warehouse, combine them with anything else you have bought, and ship them to your city.

You pay in naira, on this side.