How to Destroy Taobao

I've had a few e-mails in recent times asking for a little help with the nefarious and nebulous depths of the mighty Taobao.  If you're a native Chinese speaker - see you in the next article.  If, like me, your ability to read Chinese could best be described as "sub-optimal", then I invite you to come with me...

For those of you who haven't previously considered Taobao, it's one of the world's largest electronic trading areas (which The Economist recently quoted as being the largest), and is massively competitive for most products.  When it comes to tea, it's excellent for buying cakes from recent years, where the supply is not tightly constrained.  For rarer cakes, such as older cakes (> 5 years age) and limited-run modern cakes (Xizihao, etc.), the prices are less competitive, because very few vendors stock the products, and they can charge what they like.  However, if, like me, you buy a lot of young tea, then Taobao is ace.

Taobao is also protected by a piece of genius that has arisen out of the Chinese culture of "cash on delivery"; i.e.,  Mainland Chinese are, to a large extent, allergic to debt and credit cards (which is a healthy trait observed by several other east-Asian nations).  Payment tends to be expected only once the goods have been received and examined, and Taobao supports this via "Alipay", which is a payment system associated with Taobao in the same way that Paypal is associated with eBay.  The cunning difference is that Alipay holds funds for the products in escrow, and only releases them to the seller once the goods have been received by the buyer.  This helps to cut down on sharp practice, and gives the buyer confidence that they'll receive the goods they want, in decent condition.  While we dirty Westerners will be buying through an agent (I use the slick and reliable Taobaofocus.com), whom we pay using Paypal and so will not directly have to interact with Alipay, the existence of the system causes the seller of the pu'ercha to obey the rules.  It seems to work, very well.

Let's kick off with a search for an eminently Taobao'able purchase, something from Douji: the "Yisheng" cake.  The first thing we need to realise is that Taobao operates (unsurprisingly) using simplified Chinese, and so we'll need to find the appropriate characters for the cake we require.

Happily, Babelcarp.org makes this easy:

In the above, I have asked the 'Carp for the characters for "Yisheng".  Next, we simply go to the main Taobao.com page, and enter the characters into the search box:

Like all Chinese web-pages, Taobao looks a mess.  It's utterly chaotic, which makes it daunting for we, the laowei [dirty foreigners]:

Perhaps your browser is asking you if you'd like to translate the page at this stage.  I'm using the entirely delightful Google Chrome browser (as a once-dedicated Firefox user), which offers us just this opportunity, as you can see from the bar at the very top of the display.  However, try not to be tempted for now, because it messes up the page even more.  (You could always open a parallel copy of the page in another tab, and allow Google to translate that copy, so as not to disturb your browsing.)

From the initial search result shown above, we already have some confidence that we've found the right page, because we have some hits showing, among other things, pu'ercha cakes - here, the lovely red "Yisheng" from 2005, at a good price of 380 RMB.

Under the search bar, we can see some characters that are telling us we have 177 hits for our search (shown in bright orange/red).

The matrix of blue characters beneath allows us to refine our search into one of the various areas of Taobao.  Burn the following into the backs of your retinas:

...because it is the subsection for snacks / nuts / tea-leaves / local specialities.  We can see that there are just ten hits in this subsection.

Let's pause for a temporary diversion.  Suppose that I wanted a translation of the phrase in blue, to get an idea of what it is that I am clicking.  Chances are, this phrase isn't tea-related (it's a link on an eBay-like website, after all), and so Babelcarp can't help us.  In such cases, I often turn to Nciku.com:

Nciku, despite its bloody awful name, is a very useful site.  You can paste in your Chinese characters in the usual place, and it will do a good job of translating them.  However, the matrix to the right of the search box allows you to draw your character, which I have used on many occasions to determine what is written on my cakes' wrappers, when my dear wife isn't available.  (I'm hoping that, one day, my son will be able to translate for me.)

Nciku is also good for learning Chinese, because there are plenty of structured learning quizzes, etc.  

So, supposing I copied over the blue label from before:

...and so we learn that the Taobao subsection that contains 10 "Yisheng" hits is indeed snacks / nuts / tea-leaves / local specialities.

Clicking that blue link refines our Taobao search, and shows us what's on offer:

So far, so... good?  We appear to have one Yisheng cake (RMB 380, the Douji version, not the "Yisheng Tea Co." version), and a bunch of lesser tea-related substances.

What does all of that Chinese text in the description of the cake mean?  Well, it's probably tea-related (being the description of a pu'ercha cake), so let's go back to the mighty 'Carp...

Booyeah.  Babelcarp has managed a full translation of this one, which is great.  Occasionally, an "unknown" character will sneak into a description that lies outside Babelcarp's considerable vocabulary; it is a tea-related dictionary, after all, and not a general translator.  

So, job done.  We like the cake, we can copy-and-paste the Taobao page into the buying page of Taobaofocus.com, and we'll have our cakes before we know it.

Before we finish, there is one other route to know about - a common screen that often appears if your search has resulted in lots of pu'ercha-related hits.  This occurs if we search for a popular cake, such as the charming Changdahao from the Yiwu Manluo Tea Co.:

Crikey - what does it all mean?  We have 195 hits, but we probably don't want to scroll through them all.  Let's look at the box that has appeared underneath the orange search box:

By now, we are confident in our ability to pop each of these into Nciku.com and obtain a translation.  However, to save time: the top row allows us to narrow our search by brand.  Here, we can choose Zhongcha (i.e., CNNP-styled cakes), Dayi, Changdahao, etc.  I tend not to bother with this.

The second row is more useful: it allows us to pick shengpu or shupu.  I always pick the former.

The third row refines our search by age, if we have a particular year in mind.  It often pays to search one age bracket above and below the target bracket, just in case there is a labelling mix-up.

The bottom row can be ignored, as it refers to packaging / bulk.

With all the tools at your disposal, you can now hunt bargains in confidence.  Often, you will find that Western vendors match the Taobao prices to some degree, which is a good thing - Taobao is a useful normaliser in that regard, and buying from Western vendors can be more comfortable.

When using an agent, such as Taobaofocus.com, I invite you to consider my previous article concerning shipping.  SAL is the usual option for me, given the substantial margin between that and other other options (as shown in the article).