About China Buyer Notes

01What this site is

China Buyer Notes is an independent collection of guides about buying from Chinese marketplaces and having the goods forwarded internationally. It covers the mechanics that decide whether an order works: how agents charge, how to read a size chart, what the specification numbers in a listing actually mean, what freight really costs, and what happens when something goes wrong.

The audience is an individual buying for themselves. Not a business importing pallets, not a reseller looking for a supplier — a person with a link and a question about whether it will fit.

02Why it exists

The information a first-time buyer needs is scattered across agent help centres, community forums and seller listings, and a large share of it is written by parties with a commercial interest in the answer.

Our aim is narrower and simpler: explain the mechanism, name the numbers, and let you decide. If a guide cannot tell you something checkable — a gram weight, a millimetre, a charge, a threshold — it is not finished.

03How the guides are researched

• Published standards where they exist. Size guides follow the Chinese national adult sizing standard rather than one seller's table, which is why they can state a chest figure in centimetres instead of an approximate letter.
• Listings themselves. Specifications, measurement tables and QC photo sets published by sellers on the marketplaces buyers actually use.
• Agent documentation. Fee schedules, storage terms, inspection scope and returns policies, read side by side rather than one at a time — the differences are where the useful information lives.
• Order experience. Costs and timings are checked against what actually happened on real parcels rather than against a rate card.
• Correction by contradiction. Where two sources disagree, the guide says so and explains which figure to trust. Charts that pretend there is one true answer are the ones that cost people money.

04What this site will not do

• Take your order. We are not an agent and have no buying service.
• Give you a specific seller's name as a recommendation. We describe how to judge a listing; we do not endorse individual sellers.
• Advise on avoiding customs. Declaring honestly is both the legal route and, in our reading of the evidence, the one that loses less money.
• Help with counterfeit goods. Branded items sold far below retail carry legal risk for the buyer, and no guide here will explain how to buy them safely because there is no such method.
• Publish a review we were paid to write. See the funding note below.

05How the site is funded

Some links that lead to a catalogue or shopping service are commercial links. They are marked in the page code, they are disclosed in the footer of every page, and if a reader orders through one we may receive a commission. It costs the reader nothing.

The commission arrangement does not decide what the guides say. Where a practice is worth avoiding, the guide says so — including about services we link to.

06Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, out of date, or contradicts what you were told by a seller or agent, tell us. Freight rates, duty thresholds and platform rules all move, and a guide that has quietly gone stale is worse than no guide.