Find and Choose Items on Taobao

Finding and choosing items on Taobao is one of the main points of the buying process. Your choice of item will influence the speed of your order processing and your satisfaction when you receive it.

You can look at the “How to Search Taobao” page to learn about Taobao search.

Below, we will mainly explain how to choose the right seller and item:

a) Choose the seller / Taobao store: To select the item, first of all, you need to pay attention to Taobao sellers. There is a rating for Taobao sellers, which is based on sales volume, item quality, and customer service. Most important is the sales volume, which is visually represented by hearts, crystals, and crowns. Then, below sales volume, another interesting piece of information is the percentage of positive reviews.

When selecting an item, please choose sellers with at least one crystal or above (3-5 crystals are good, and a crown or several crowns are perfect).

The number of positive feedback should not be below 98%.

Where to check this information? On the item page, the seller’s name may be displayed at the top of the page or to the right or left of the main item image.

Usually, each Taobao seller has a shop. To see other items from this seller, you can click on the first button (written 首页 in Chinese) in the horizontal menu on the item page, which will take you to the home page of this seller’s Taobao store.

b) Availability of stock. Most of the sellers on Taobao.com are private individuals or agents of various factories. For this reason, the availability of items in stock is not always updated, and information about the seller’s stock is often inaccurate. There are two possible explanations:

– some Taobao sellers start to get stock only after receiving order (i.e., sellers will purchase items only after an order is received online at the store on taobao.com)

– most sellers intentionally display a large number of items available in stock, so they are always shown in search results on taobao.com (if the seller sets an item as out of stock, then this item will disappear from search results on Taobao so that it would decrease the number of visitors to seller’s store, and therefore less potential customers).

If you place an order for an item that is not available, we will cancel it. Then, you can submit another item for purchase from a different seller.

So, how do we know whether items are available?
It is impossible to know whether an item is available. Sometimes, even the seller does not know in advance. So, you can only see it after you buy it.

However, some details may indicate if the item is in stock.

First, sellers with higher ratings are more likely to have items available in stock. Sellers with high ratings often own warehouses and can provide more accurate inventory information.

Second, it is better to choose the item that was sold at least a few times over the last month. If there are no sales, it is most likely that the item is not available. You also need to pay attention to the fact that items with a high volume of sales may be sold out, and new stock has not arrived yet.

Third, on the item page near the primary photo, there should not be the following statement: 宝贝 下 架 – this indicates that the item is not available.


Now, let’s learn how to choose the correct item parameters.