I am using cssbuy for more than a year now, and would like to share my opinion and why I use it.
Firstly, What is CSSBUY?
This company acts as taobao agent/reship company, means that they can order products from tatobao and ship it to you, or you may ship any package to their address in China and they will reship it to your country.
Why I use it?
I live in Israel, we don’t have good competition here in the electronic components field and batteries, what means that importers keep high price and high minimum quantity - which is BAD for my DIY projects,
I tried to use DigiKey, Farnell and others… but their shipping price is Crazy… so it is irrelevant for me.
After researching all the options I decided that the cheapest place to order components is TAOBAO - why? They have *huge *variety, competition and good prices.
This is where cssbuy comes handy, most of the taobao sellers don’t ship to worldwide, so I use cssbuy to buy the products for me, repack it an ship it to my home - for 6% fee of total products price.
They also offer a nice variety of shipping companies (express and regular post) for a good price.
How I use it?
I am using Google Translate to search on Taobao.com and find relevant product.
I go to cssbuy, paste the links I found there
Place the order
Recharge the account with money (I use paypal, but you may choose another services as well)
Wait till cssbuy buy the items, you will see the items in “Pending” : imgur:hkoK5es
After everything is ready, you will see everything under: “In Wharhouse”
Submit all the products to ship and choose the right shipping method for you.
All the products will be under “Submitted to ship” (For example my last components order: imgur:1QHSvdr
Wait for the tracking number from cssbuy
TL;DR
Pros:
Ship taobao products to worldwide
Good shipping price
Good customer service
Accept PayPal and more
Cons:
6% fee for service
Sometimes is a hassle to order through an agent rather than
Account should be “recharged” with money, no option to pay for everything ahead
I started to research this. There are sevcral agents. But what is best? Because if you order many items you will get discounts from the taobao seller.
I dont want to leave this to the taobao agent pockets. From what agent do we see the actual price paid to taobao seller?
I’m guessing that any discounts for volume gets claimed by cssbuy. That is okay with me as w/o the cssbuy service I wouldn’t be able to even buy the item in the first place. That’s my rationalization.
I ordered a screen.
Agent cssbuy said he can’t buy these goods because it contains magnets and a battery ??
After claiming that the products do not contain a battery and a magnet
accepted the purchase and lost the package ??
They do not return the money because they are waiting for the package to be returned to the warehouse, but that is why they duly charge for the service that they did not perform, ie they did not send the goods by fedex post ??
All in all, I ran out of money and goods.
I ordered a screen.
Agent cssbuy said he can’t buy these goods because it contains magnets and a battery ??
After claiming that the products do not contain a battery and a magnet
accepted the purchase and lost the package ??
They do not return the money because they are waiting for the package to be returned to the warehouse, but that is why they duly charge for the service that they did not perform, ie they did not send the goods by fedex post ??
All in all, I ran out of money and goods.