Six things worth comparing, and how to check each one yourself
Fees, routes, speed, service, safety and trust. Only two of the six have numbers you can look up. This page is about what to do with the other four.
1. Fees, which is the one that decides the rest
Put this first because it is the only dimension where a small difference compounds on every single order you ever place.
Start with the thing that surprises people: of the 34 agents in the sampled fee table, 29 charge no agent service fee at all. The advertised zero is real. It is also not where the money is.
The money is in the exchange rate. You pay in your currency, the agent buys in yuan, and the gap between their rate and the market rate is the actual price of the service. On the sampled table that gap ran from +0.4% at the low end to +18.1% at the high end. On a 300 dollar haul that spread is about 53 dollars, which is more than most people save by hunting for a cheaper line.
| Agent | All-in markup | Service fee | FX markup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sugargoo | +0.4% | $0 | +0.4% |
| Fansbuy | +1.3% | $0 | +1.3% |
| LoongBuy | +2.0% | $0 | +2.0% |
| CSSBuy | +6.4% | 6% | +0.4% |
| LoloBuy | +7.0% | $0 | +7.0% |
| HUBBUY | +7.1% | $0 | +7.1% |
Sampled 2026-10-02. Historical comparison sample; confirm a live quote before ordering.
CSSBuy is the entry to understand even if you never use it. It charges a visible 6% service fee and marks the rate up by only +0.4%, which is the opposite shape to everyone else. A fee you can see is not worse than a margin you cannot. Compare the all-in column, not the fee column.
LoongBuy is a useful illustration of why these figures need dates on them. In a July sample it sat at +8.9%. In the October sample it is at +2.0%. Nothing about the agent changed in a way you could see from outside; the number moved. Any page telling you who is cheapest without telling you when it checked is quietly out of date.
Where the money actually goes breaks every line item down, including the tax wording that makes two identical looking quotes mean different things.
2. Routes, where the answer stops being general
An agent is not cheap or expensive. An agent is cheap or expensive to your country, at your parcel weight.
55cells
destination and weight combinations priced in one pass
sampled 2026-10-07
8agents
came out cheapest in at least one cell
sampled 2026-10-07
11 of 11countries
where the winner changes with parcel weight
sampled 2026-10-07
Germany is the clean example. Up to one kilo the cheapest line belongs to one agent. At two kilos and five kilos it belongs to a different one. Same country, same day, same table. The United States does the same thing twice over, moving through three agents as the parcel gets heavier.
This is why no honest version of this page ends in a ranked list. Ask the question with your country and your weight attached and it has a clear answer. Ask it in general and it does not have one.
The full route tables carry all 55 cells, and the picker there answers the question for your case.
3. Speed, which is not the opposite of cheap but often costs like it
In 14 of the 55 sampled cells, the cheapest available line needs thirty days or more. Those are sea and rail lines, and they are cheap for the obvious reason. The worst case in the sample is a five kilo parcel to Spain at 129 to 139 days.
So read the two columns together. A quote of 95 yuan at 55 to 75 days and a quote of 82 yuan at 7 to 10 days are not competing offers; they are different products. Several agents quietly list both and the cheaper row sorts first.
The practical rule: decide your deadline before you look at prices. If you need it this month, filter to lines under three weeks first and then compare what is left. Doing it the other way round is how people end up waiting out a rail shipment they did not know they chose.
4. Service, which you can only judge by what they commit to in writing
Everyone promises good service. What differs is how specific they are willing to be when it is written down and binding.
Useful questions with checkable answers: how long will they store a parcel for free, and what happens on the day after that. Does the warehouse take photos as standard or only on request. Can you ask for extra photos, and does that cost. Is there a published processing time between your payment and the parcel moving.
Storage is the easiest one to check and the one that bites hardest. The sampled table shows free storage running from 60 days up to 300. One agent states a 90 day standard and a 180 day hard ceiling, after which the goods are treated as abandoned. That second number is the one that matters and most comparison pages never mention it exists.
5. Safety, meaning what survives the warehouse and the border
Two different risks get called safety and they have different answers.
The first is the parcel itself. Read the inspection policy to find out what the warehouse looks at, which is narrower than most people assume, and read the insurance terms to find out what happens when something is missing. One set of terms we read caps compensation at 10,000 RMB per parcel, gives you three days from delivery to file a claim, and refuses any claim that does not come with an unboxing video. Those three facts decide more than any review does.
The second is customs, and here nobody is on your side. One agent says in writing that it cannot guarantee a parcel will not be taxed, and adds that its own duty threshold table was collected from the internet and is not authoritative. That is the most honest sentence in any of these documents, and it tells you to treat every tax estimate you see, including theirs, as a guess.
What quality check photos do and do not cover goes through the inspection side in detail.
6. Trust, and the one thing you can genuinely verify
Nobody can tell you which agent will take your money. Anyone who says they can is guessing in public.
There is no public, reproducible dataset on which agents fail their customers. There are forum threads, and forum threads are the first place a competitor goes to post. So this site does not rate trust. It reads terms instead, because terms are published, dated, and binding in a way a Reddit comment is not.
What reading them tells you is roughly this: an agent that publishes a compensation ceiling, a claim window, an evidence requirement and an exclusion list has thought about failure and has decided what it will pay for. An agent whose terms page is three paragraphs of reassurance has not told you anything, and that absence is information.
One caution before you treat terms as a differentiator. These documents repeat across companies. One agent's refund page names a completely different company in its own body text. Another's return window matches a third agent word for word, down to the same 5 RMB fee and the same 120 hour clock. They are running the same platform software with the same template underneath. Identical clauses tell you about the vendor they bought from, not about either company. Treat them as shared boilerplate and nothing more.
Warning signs and how to check them covers the part that actually costs beginners money, which is not the agent at all.
Before you commit to one: four checks, about ten minutes
Find the all-in markup, not the service fee
Open the fee comparison, read the all-in column, and note the date on it. If the page you are reading has no date, close it.
Find the storage ceiling, not the free period
The free period is advertised. The ceiling, after which your goods are considered abandoned, is in the terms. Both numbers matter and only one is on the homepage.
Find the compensation clause and read the exclusions
Look for the per parcel cap, the claim window, and what evidence they require. The exclusion list is the useful part: customs duties and fines are excluded everywhere, so that risk is always yours.
Find out who operates it
A company name, a registration number, a real address. Some agents publish all three. Some publish a contact form. This is not proof of anything on its own, but it tells you who you would be chasing.
What you cannot check, no matter how long you look
Whether this particular agent will handle your particular problem well. No amount of reading settles that, and the only hedge is to keep your first order small.
Then go look at the agents we list, where each entry gives one reason drawn from the sample rather than from the agent's own copy.
These are snapshot numbers, not live rates. The date shown is when the figure was sampled, not when this page was built.