My virgin Taobao shopping experience with SGshop

I’ve never been a big fan of online shopping as I’ve had negative experiences of receiving items in the wrong size, defective items, ‘dead’ (unresponsive) sellers, among other online shopping woes. But Taobao proved too hard to resist and a quick check on Google for a Taobao agent pointed me to SGShop as the “most reliable & cost effective taobao agent” (their words, not mine).

So, how did my virgin Taobao experience go?

I had FULLY EXPECTED that some of my purchased items would not reach me, for one reason or another. And this is shocking…

ALL items reached Singapore’s shores safely from China! *clap clap*

I have no idea how SGshop did it but I’m grateful all these reached me safely…

My Purchases:

You already know about my infatuation with Hello Kitty so there it is. A gorgeous Hello Kitty vanity case, with a bling bling hairband on top.

Then there’s the instax camera case, 2 pairs of cufflinks, one Hello Kitty ring (hehe!) and 2 Hello Kitty pendants.

On your right are squash and tennis rackets (for the fiance and myself). So far, we have used the squash rackets twice. I’m not actually sure about the authenticity of the rackets (Wilson is supposed to be a “pricey” brand?) but they seem pretty good so it’s good value for money anyway.

And the white fur cloth that all these items are sitting on is also one of my purchases. LOL! It comes in handy during photo-taking when I need to do a blogpost about a product review.

So, how much did I pay in total for all of these PLUS their shipping costs to Singapore?

S$183.34

It’s not exactly dirt-cheap but I have no complaints ‘cos everything reached me safely and I really adore the Hello Kitty items!

So, here are some pros and cons with shopping with SGshop…

Pros:

1) Great customer service – you get SMS notifications about successful credit top-ups into your account, when there’s a problem with your order (specifications, shipping, etc), when payment has been confirmed, when the order has arrived in SG, etc.

2) Very reliable – they checked all items for defects before sending them over to SG from their Guangzhou warehouse. There was no item I needed to send back at all!

3) Easy-to-use order system – I can type in English and communicate with SGshop staff instead of trying to figure out Chinese characters for what I want in order to communicate with sellers in China.

Cons:

1) Items which are light but slightly bigger are charged according to volumetric weight (trust me, I had NO idea what this is. I learnt something new!) – if you want to know how this is calculated, check this out: http://www.sgshop.com.sg/help.php?action=view&id=110

So, I really regretted purchasing the instax case – it comes in its original, small cardboard box, but interestingly enough, it was placed into a bigger box before being sent to me. I believe it’s to prevent damage to the original box, but I ended up paying more for shipping due to ‘volumetric weight’. The item is really light, but because of the space it takes up, I ended up paying more for shipping:

Not cool. So don’t repeat my mistake.