OK, so you are in China and have been doing ok, but you really need a few items you just can't get at your local market, like maybe a piece of your favorite chocolate, or a board game you wish you'd brought, or maybe a bunch of cheese you'd rather buy in bulk at 48 RMB per kilo than the 80 RMB+ they charge in the store. Maybe you really wish you could find a yellow cake mix or some chili powder or some whey protein for those healthy shakes. What can you do?
Don't you wish you could order on Ebay or Amazon and have that stuff show up at your door? Well you can, sort of. There is a whole ton of this stuff and more sold online in China every day. Most of it is available and a whole lot more all at www.taobao.com.cn. It is essentially the Ebay of China, only better in some ways. It has about anything you could want. So click in there and check it out. Is it all in Chinese or is it translated? Well you’ll need to get it to translate into some English for it to work, so if you haven’t already go pull up Internet Explorer and install the IE Translator tab for it. It will auto translate sites for you and allows you to read TaoBao mostly in English, though the translations are a bit silly at times.
So search for something you want and see if you can find it. To start with all you really need to do is create a login, add your Chinese address to your account and start buying. The tricky part comes in paying. Our first purchase on TaoBao was at Thanksgiving when my wife REALLY wanted a pound or two of real FRESH cranberries to make some good cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. We didn’t have a lot of the stuff we wanted at Thanksgiving but that was a tradition we just didn’t feel we could do without, so I found it on TaoBao and found a seller in Shanghai that was selling them. I went to check out and found this seller accepted “cash on delivery” as a payment option. I thought, what the heck, let’s try it. Quite a few sellers accept this method and to our delight the overnighted cranberries arrived the next day at our door, I paid the delivery guy the agreed upon fee at the door and that was that! They came nicely packaged and still cold thanks to some dry ice around the internal container. It was a wonderful surprise for my wife and I both!
OK, so you can buy stuff this way with Cash on Delivery quite easily, or you can go to the next level and buy ANYTHING there on TaoBao by getting a Chinese checking account. It is easier than you think, really. All you have to do is bringing a couple hundred RMB to any bank, show them your passport and pull out the money and they will probably guess you want to set up an account, or at the very least direct you to someone who speaks a little English. They will need your Chinese cell phone # and your passport number, and possibly your home address, again just have that on your text messages on your phone from the last lesson and show them that on your phone.
You will also be asked to sign about 5-6 pages of random stuff and you’ll be delighted by all the stamping of official looking red stamps on every piece of paper all over the place. The paper alone is worth the cost to open the account! You will also have to enter a pin number, which in China is a 6 digit number, not a 4 digit number. I would recommend using your normal 4 digit pin number from your former life, plus “11” after it, but whatever you want to do is great. Just know you will have to enter it at least twice to set up your account and get your card.
Also be sure and tell them you want it to be internet payment enabled, which will require them to ask for another pin number just for that…. I just use the same one for both the ATM card and the online pin #, it is easier. They will probably charge you 50 RMB to set up the account and another 50 for the electronic one, plus another 100 RMB deposit to make them feel like you aren’t a total cheap-skate. They will also give you a little USB flash drive that you will want to put on your key chain and not lose. It looks silly and all, but to make any online payments you have to have that plugged into your computer and their little proprietary software running on your computer. The software comes on the USB drive but if yours is like mine the USB drive-loaded software would not load on my computer since my laptop is from the USA and doesn’t have Chinese character programming enabled. I have mine with the China Construction Bank and was able to go to their English version of their website and download an English version of the software that works great with my USB plug-in device. You may have to fiddle with that a bit.
Anyway, after getting the bank account set up you should be able to go to the bank’s website when prompted on TaoBao at checkout and make a payment. Note that there are 2-3 ways to make online payments for items on Taobao, and all but one of them requires an Allpay account with your Chinese Identity Card # input. The 2nd bank payment option on the checkout allows for the online payment with the USB thing from the bank plugged in and running and does NOT require any special ID number. For China Construction Bank at least you do have to enter 3 bits of data on their website when prompted to get the USB thing to pull up and log you in. It is in 3 boxes and the first box was my passport number, the 2nd box my 6’digit pin, and the 3rd box some security picture of some letters that comes up on screen.
If you have trouble setting this up it may be worth having a Chinese person who has some computer skills help you, just keep all the papers relating to the USB drive and remember your pin and stuff and you should be fine after they help you with it the first time. After all of this you can then go to the bank you are signed up with and go to their ATMs and actually deposit cash into your Checking Account anytime you want to buy something on TaoBao. You can also use this Chinese bank account for payments at most restaurants and businesses. I personally think it is a good idea to keep a few hundred RMB in this account at all times just in case your USA ATM card gets a security hold on it or has some other trouble at some point while you are in the China.
Don't you wish you could order on Ebay or Amazon and have that stuff show up at your door? Well you can, sort of. There is a whole ton of this stuff and more sold online in China every day. Most of it is available and a whole lot more all at www.taobao.com.cn. It is essentially the Ebay of China, only better in some ways. It has about anything you could want. So click in there and check it out. Is it all in Chinese or is it translated? Well you’ll need to get it to translate into some English for it to work, so if you haven’t already go pull up Internet Explorer and install the IE Translator tab for it. It will auto translate sites for you and allows you to read TaoBao mostly in English, though the translations are a bit silly at times.
So search for something you want and see if you can find it. To start with all you really need to do is create a login, add your Chinese address to your account and start buying. The tricky part comes in paying. Our first purchase on TaoBao was at Thanksgiving when my wife REALLY wanted a pound or two of real FRESH cranberries to make some good cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving. We didn’t have a lot of the stuff we wanted at Thanksgiving but that was a tradition we just didn’t feel we could do without, so I found it on TaoBao and found a seller in Shanghai that was selling them. I went to check out and found this seller accepted “cash on delivery” as a payment option. I thought, what the heck, let’s try it. Quite a few sellers accept this method and to our delight the overnighted cranberries arrived the next day at our door, I paid the delivery guy the agreed upon fee at the door and that was that! They came nicely packaged and still cold thanks to some dry ice around the internal container. It was a wonderful surprise for my wife and I both!
OK, so you can buy stuff this way with Cash on Delivery quite easily, or you can go to the next level and buy ANYTHING there on TaoBao by getting a Chinese checking account. It is easier than you think, really. All you have to do is bringing a couple hundred RMB to any bank, show them your passport and pull out the money and they will probably guess you want to set up an account, or at the very least direct you to someone who speaks a little English. They will need your Chinese cell phone # and your passport number, and possibly your home address, again just have that on your text messages on your phone from the last lesson and show them that on your phone.
You will also be asked to sign about 5-6 pages of random stuff and you’ll be delighted by all the stamping of official looking red stamps on every piece of paper all over the place. The paper alone is worth the cost to open the account! You will also have to enter a pin number, which in China is a 6 digit number, not a 4 digit number. I would recommend using your normal 4 digit pin number from your former life, plus “11” after it, but whatever you want to do is great. Just know you will have to enter it at least twice to set up your account and get your card.
Also be sure and tell them you want it to be internet payment enabled, which will require them to ask for another pin number just for that…. I just use the same one for both the ATM card and the online pin #, it is easier. They will probably charge you 50 RMB to set up the account and another 50 for the electronic one, plus another 100 RMB deposit to make them feel like you aren’t a total cheap-skate. They will also give you a little USB flash drive that you will want to put on your key chain and not lose. It looks silly and all, but to make any online payments you have to have that plugged into your computer and their little proprietary software running on your computer. The software comes on the USB drive but if yours is like mine the USB drive-loaded software would not load on my computer since my laptop is from the USA and doesn’t have Chinese character programming enabled. I have mine with the China Construction Bank and was able to go to their English version of their website and download an English version of the software that works great with my USB plug-in device. You may have to fiddle with that a bit.
Anyway, after getting the bank account set up you should be able to go to the bank’s website when prompted on TaoBao at checkout and make a payment. Note that there are 2-3 ways to make online payments for items on Taobao, and all but one of them requires an Allpay account with your Chinese Identity Card # input. The 2nd bank payment option on the checkout allows for the online payment with the USB thing from the bank plugged in and running and does NOT require any special ID number. For China Construction Bank at least you do have to enter 3 bits of data on their website when prompted to get the USB thing to pull up and log you in. It is in 3 boxes and the first box was my passport number, the 2nd box my 6’digit pin, and the 3rd box some security picture of some letters that comes up on screen.
If you have trouble setting this up it may be worth having a Chinese person who has some computer skills help you, just keep all the papers relating to the USB drive and remember your pin and stuff and you should be fine after they help you with it the first time. After all of this you can then go to the bank you are signed up with and go to their ATMs and actually deposit cash into your Checking Account anytime you want to buy something on TaoBao. You can also use this Chinese bank account for payments at most restaurants and businesses. I personally think it is a good idea to keep a few hundred RMB in this account at all times just in case your USA ATM card gets a security hold on it or has some other trouble at some point while you are in the China.