My friends and I were planning for Halloween Cosplay activity. However, the costumes on eBay were incredibly expensive and looked bad. Also, a lot of them are actually from China. So we decided to look up Taobao, the biggest Chinese trading website. But the shipping fees were higher than the costumes themselves.

It occurs to me, there are several websites focused on helping Chinese people buy Chinese products that can provide us with lower shipping fees. Dotdotbuy is one of them. We did the calculation about the price and shipping fees and got a formula for it: [(weight-500 g)/500*39+116]*1.205*1.05, then we found the price is still lower than those on eBay!

Of course we chose Dotdotbuy at last. But as a Sauder student, I would think more of this.

Websites like Dotdotbuy can be seen as an important middlemen. With the help of these or signing contracts with big shipping companies in the future, Taobao can surely compete with eBay. Although now eBay is known by more people, Taobao has good quality and lower price. I have saw their advertisements on Weibo and other Chinese social networks, I think they can change their marketing strategies to broader the market.