What a Chinese shopping agent is, and why the job exists at all
Someone in China buys the item for you, holds it, and posts it on. That is the whole service. Everything else is detail about how each one does it.
The job, in the order it happens
('You find a listing on a Chinese marketplace. You cannot check out on it, because it wants a Chinese payment method and will only ship to a Chinese address. So you hand the link to an agent.
The agent buys it with their own account and their own money, has it delivered to their warehouse, and tells you it arrived. Usually they photograph it at that point. Your items sit there until you decide to ship, which is also when several of them get packed into one box. Then you pay international freight and it leaves.
Two payments, not one. That trips up almost everybody the first time: you pay for the goods when they are bought, and you pay for shipping weeks later when you know the weight.
Why go through an agent instead of buying direct
Because for most of these listings there is no direct to buy. The marketplaces in question are domestic: the checkout expects a Chinese phone number, a Chinese payment method, and a Chinese delivery address. Some sellers will not ship outside the mainland at all.
The second reason is boxes. If you order from six sellers you get six parcels, and six international shipments cost far more than one. The warehouse step exists so that six becomes one, and that consolidation is usually worth more than any difference in service fee.
The third reason is that somebody looks at the thing before it crosses an ocean. How much they look at it is a real question with a narrower answer than most people expect, which is why it has its own page.
The usual buying-agent process
Worth knowing, because these are not differentiators no matter who claims them.
Buy on your behalf, warehouse, consolidate, ship
All of them. The four step shape is identical across the industry.
Take photos when goods arrive
Standard almost everywhere. What the photos are checked against is where they differ.
Offer free storage for a period
Everyone does. The length varies from 60 days to 300, and the hard ceiling behind that is a separate number.
Charge you twice, once for goods and once for freight
Universal. Any quote you see before the parcel is weighed is an estimate.
Leave customs entirely to you
Every set of terms we read excludes duties, taxes and fines. Nobody is absorbing that for you.
What actually differs, and by how much
('Four things, in rough order of how much money they move.
', '29 of 34agents
charge no service fee, so the margin is in the exchange rate
sampled 2026-10-02
60 to 300days
range of advertised free storage
sampled 2026-10-02
Then routes, which is the one people underestimate. The same parcel to the same country can differ by a factor of two depending on which agent you hand it to, and the winner changes with weight. The route tables have the numbers.
And finally the terms, which cost nothing until the day they cost everything. LoongBuy, CSSBuy, Fansbuy and the rest publish quite different documents, and the differences only matter once. How to read them is a page of its own.
The six dimensions puts all four together, and the walkthrough runs the whole path once with nothing skipped.
')