Thanks JMak, I did see your suggestion yesterday but this won't fit an Oral B toothbrush.
Review Aliexpress.com - Feedback Thread
- Thread starter raksrules
- Start date
PoBoy
Innovator
fastapifastdisks
Galvanizer
fastapifastdisks
Galvanizer
Digigear
Forerunner
If the shipping address is in India, you cannot checkout order. Doesn't matter where you do this from.
Your best bet is to ship to someone outside India if they're coming over.
nithishsabapathi
Explorer
nRiTeCh
Oracle
How to do that? I reached out to few sellers but seems they are reluctant to ship to India or taking no responsibilities..
nithishsabapathi
Explorer
If you can get it off eBay, then it is better to do so as you get buyer protection and every order is tracked with quick refunds in case delivery is not done on time. Trying to get the seller to ship on AE using other means (like through chat) is very risky as you are likely to get ripped off. Forwarding services will charge extra, so probably only worth using for items that you cannot get elsewhere and you will have to pay extra for insurance if you want peace of mind.
Rezep
Galvanizer
I went through this entire thread and I'm surprised that no one has mentioned parcel forwarder/ agents till now but It's mostly used by people to buy replica clothing so I can understand why.
The way it works is basically, you use the agent (cssbuy, citygobuy etc) and you place the order for whatever good you want through their website from whichever chinese website it may be.
The employees then purchase it, it gets shipped to their warehouse and you can choose to some extra services like taking pics of the product (mainly used for clothing tho, some agents don't charge some do)
After this they place your item in storage, you can either buy more items and ship it all together as one big package or ship just that one item out.
https://reparchive.com/shipping-calculator-comparison/ Here is a shipping calculator that will compare all of the agents shipping costs according to size and weight, packages that weigh more than 1kg in my opinion, is best shipped with either aramex,ems or e-ems through citygobuy or CSSBuy since these have the best rates to India
For smaller stuff that some of you guys buy here that would weigh like 100gms, the shipping calculator again suggests NLpost from superbuy (I have never used superbuy before) or china post registered air mail.
I myself have purchased a few replica shoes and it's currently being shipped but I believe these agents can be perfectly used for aliexpress, banggood (whatever chinese website that can't ship to india), heck I bought my shoes off weidian and taobao which you couldn't buy directly in India in the first place
Subreddits like r/fashionreps and r/repfamindia should give some credibility and more informational threads regarding this
And yes, they do obviously charge a fee (citygobuy exchange rate compared to CSSbuy is bad) but again what can we do, this is the only way to procure some of the goods from china.
Rezep
Galvanizer
Taobao while it does have far more of a selection for clothing (anything really), it isn't the easiest website to browse on from India as well (vpn, signups etc), I will mostly just make the agent buy it for me from the link that I saw on a reddit post of a particular shirt etc but weidian and other websites are far easier
Do these agents declare the actual price from the website or a lower one? Haven't yet had to pay custom duty for anything purchased off the Chinese sellers from eBay even for ones approaching $100.
Rezep
Galvanizer
Depends on the agent, CSSBuy has the option to either let them declare the value of the goods (they won't declare the actual price you paid) or for you to do it which is the best imo. The advice from the mods on r/repfamindia and others is to ask your agent to paste the invoice onto the parcel itself, it seems that's where majority of the trouble with customs in india comes from when that invoice is missing on the parcel itself.
I asked my citygobuy agent to paste the invoice and declared 2 pairs of shoes at around 30 usd, currently it's still in transit. Afaik customs in delhi, mumbai and kerala are a pita but other states seem to be a bit more lenient
Here's the invoice they pasted for mine (not in hand, pics sent by agent)
Fancy seeing fellow Indian repfam here in Techenclave haha. What are the odds!?
fastapifastdisks
Galvanizer
which was the smoothest agent experience ? i see multiple agents have almost similar pricing, superbuy and citigobuy being the cheapest for large 1kg parcel's. want to order watercooling gear and mech key parts from taobao.
In my experience, superbuy & their sister service Wegobuy have the fastest order fulfillment time, but they are expensive in all regards. Citygobuy is slow and expensive with respect to the Exchange rate, but they accept UPI payments, being the only agent right now who does so. Cssbuy has the cheapest exchange rates, and the cheapest lines to India if I am not wrong. But they too take a while to place your order and ship it, though they seem to be improving on that aspect as well. They don't accept UPI though. There's also Sugargoo, who are mostly decent all around. Every agent has the shipping calculator, so do check that out.
Rezep
Galvanizer
You'll have to keep in mind that the prices you see on there will not be the final price that you pay at shipping, My 2.6kg parcel which would have been around 254 yuan (3k inr) came to around 3.6k inr after cgb's own exchange rate (which I think is 6.26 yuan : 1 usd) and paypal/UPI (yes they have UPI surprisingly) conversion fees.
CSSBuy's exchange rate is much better at around 6.4 yuan : 1 usd so you're getting more for your money. Both CGB and CSSBuy website UI is quite trash, it's usable but can be well improved upon (Best to use expert buy where you use a form to input the url of the product and tell them what exactly it is that you want)
CGB tends to charge more fees from just ordering an item tho if I remember right, They took around 1.3 usd on a 31 dollar shoe. CSS doesn't charge service fee until you ship the product where they will take X% depending on your account level (most accounts which are opened via a referral link get around 4% charged). In my opinion and without me spending too much time dwelling on the chump change, CSSBuy is cheaper when it comes to their exchange rate and services, is it by a whole lot? No not by that much compared to it's competitors but it is cheaper
CSS gives you more control over what services you want, unlimited QC pics for 1.5 yuan, Measuring your shoe for 5 yuan (ridiculous price for just a picture where they pull a measuring tape out) Priority Purchase where you pay a bit extra and they order your item immediately within an hour to at max a day, CGB on the other hand provides only around 5 QC pics for free, an extra 3 is given for free according to your request. CGB doesn't have any priority purchase option, you either get lucky and they order it in a day or they take their own sweetass time
There's also another concept called rehearsal shipping which is basically the agent repacking the Items properly into a box and giving a proper weight of the parcel, until you do this most agents will just give you an estimate weight for which you can pay for and after paying they will pack it and weigh the actual parcel, but the estimate weight is highly likely to be inaccurate, you could end up paying over the actual weight (Excess cash will be given back via agent balance) or if you underpaid they will ask you to pay up the actual amount. Rehearsal shipping just gets rid of that headache, they basically more or less pack it and weigh it first then give you the quote for the actual shipping cost. CGB does this for free, there's a button called manual quote for when you want to ship your parcel. CSSBuy on the otherhand charges 15 yuan for it.
Now for the actual part of your question
They're all somewhat equally the same
Ok to put it in a better way, they both have their own pros and cons. These days people are more annoyed with Citygobuy and their long order times as well as refund processing. Personally for me I didn't have much of a problem ordering but I agree they do take a bit too long at times. CSSBuy seems to be more consistent with their ordering time but recently they have more or less become the most popular agents for europeans and americans and so sometimes orders do take a bit longer than before but it far more consistent and precise compared to CGB for sure.
In terms of customer service, CSSBuy has a huge discord server with many representatives that can help you out, CGB also stepped up and have their own discord server now as well.
CSSBuy also has far better coupons too, you get like 2 when you join them and another 2 from their discord server (20 yuan, 30 yuan and even 50 yuan coupons for shipping etc)
If I were to purchase anything from china again, I would personally go for CSSBuy, they're cheaper and their service is more consistent than CGB but you can't really go wrong with both
imo ignore superbuy or any other agent unless you are sure of the weight of the item that you're purchasing and have checked it with the comparison calculator and superbuy or any other agent has the cheapest shipping line (I have never used those china post or NLpost shipping lines and can't find any posts of people using that in India so I can't say)
Shipping wise tho for India you basically have 2 options
E-EMS/EMS - E-EMS is the cheaper one but honestly the delivery time between EMS and E-EMS almost seems nonexistent. E-EMS at the moment takes around average 25 days to get delivered if there aren't any customs problem (majority of the time there isn't any unless your'e insane and declare like $5 for a luxury watch/bag)
Aramex (VOLUMETRIC WEIGHT IS 9/10 ALWAYS HIGHER THAN ACTUAL WEIGHT) - If the item you're ordering is small or money isn't a problem for you (and you have connections at customs) then aramex is the fastest, delivered usually within 2 weeks
Now if you use the comparison calculator that I have linked, you'll notice for like 3 kilos and below, aramex is cheaper than E-EMS. Well the simple reason for that is, E-EMS is ACTUAL weight whereas aramex is length*width*height/5000. CGB's Calculator for lwh is broken hence why the comparison calculator doesn't change when you change the values of lwh as well.
For example :- A 900gm parcel would come to around 90 yuan shipping which is cheaper than the rest of the options, however that is false because aramex is volumetric and 9 times out of 10, volumetric is always higher than actual weight, so let's say the actual size of the parcel is 35x25x17/5000=2.9 kg. 2.9 Kg is what you would input so the actual price becomes 236 yuan, where as using E-EMS it's only around 130 yuan.
Hence aramex is only good if you're buying something small, where the actual weight will be more than the volumetric weight or you're ready to pay as much as you can just to get an item from china as quick as possible. Shipping via aramex will also require you to give proper documents about the value of the Item as well, customs dodging does not exist with Aramex edit :- Actually, some people just had to pay the basic duty fees normally, the reddit thread I've linked was probably a heavily undervalued declaration which was a mistake by the OP
Ignore CSSbuy's aramex at the moment, it recently got added but is 2x the price of CGB's Aramex and it's a joke right now
Alright I've given a summary of what I've learnt over the past 6 months, if there's any more questions ask me. Btw I'm not affiliated with any of these agents, just a fellow techenclave member wanting to help people out
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