Taobao Now Accepts International Customers!

Just a heads up as I only found out about this yesterday from my sister-- Taobao now accepts international users, and you can pay with a Visa credit card. This means that you can now purchase through Taobao without an agent. In comparison, before you could only sign up and use Taobao with a Chinese bank account and other China-only verification ID's (passport, phone number, and so on).

 

Yesterday I tried to sign up for Alipay and then Taobao, however Alipay didn't have an international option so I completely fudged up that account by accident so then I had to abandon it. Conversely though, when you create a Taobao account now-- which does have international options so that you can fill out your information correctly so that it doesn't get frozen-- an Alipay account will automatically be made for you with your Taobao account. For those who don't know, Alipay is like the Paypal of Taobao-- it's the preferred choice for many Taobao stores for payments.

 

Note that you should fill out your information carefully instead of willy-nilly like me though, because now I have two Alipay accounts (one somewhat functional, the other functional but my phone number became my Alipay username-- which I don't think was supposed to happen, lol) since if you mess up and move money around with a falsely filled out account, they can freeze your account. That can be really bad, for instance, if a seller issued you a refund and you hadn't had time to withdraw those funds yet.

I tried this a couple of months ago but it really depends on the seller. One of the sellers accepted my payment but in the end, we had to refund the transaction cause they said it'd be to expensive ship. Some sellers don't accept international orders as a whole. This would be a great feature if they all shipped.

Whaaat! That sucks. D: I'll keep that in mind.

 

I also need to brush up on Simplified Chinese because I'm only good at reading Traditional Chinese. uwu; As a heads up to everyone, they don't have an international version of the site yet, it seems. Also, Taobao is very image heavy so even if you run the website through a translator, a lot of the buttons that you need to click on to do account maintenance will still be images (of course).

Yeah, it depends on the seller.