The rest of the field, mapped not ranked

Three kinds of service, and what separates them

People use the phrase shopping agent for three different businesses. Telling them apart saves a great deal of confusion when you are comparing prices that are not comparable.

A purchasing agent buys on your behalf, receives, inspects, photographs, stores and forwards. You pay goods, freight and whatever the agent charges for its own work. Tomebuy works this way, and its own charge for that work is nil.

A forwarder only handles the second half. You buy with your own accounts and have the goods sent to a warehouse address. Cheaper on paper, since there is no purchasing to pay for, but it needs accounts and a payment method that the Chinese marketplaces accept. Tomebuy offers this as a second door; many services do only this.

A marketplace export route is the platform shipping abroad itself. Fewest moving parts and no inspection stage, which is fine for ordinary goods and poor for anything where you would want photographs before committing to freight.

How to compare two agents honestly

Price comparisons between services are mostly noise, because the goods and the carriers are the same and the variable is the agent's own cut. Choosing an agent is really six questions, and they get at the differences that matter:

1. What does the service itself charge? A flat nothing, a percentage of the goods, or a fee per order. Percentages matter most on expensive items.
2. How many photographs come free, and what else is on sale? One shot with a tape in it beats five more angles.
3. How long is free storage, and is the figure consistent? This is where young services show their age.
4. What is the returns window, and who pays when there is no fault?
5. Is there a published freight calculator? Some publish rate tables; others quote only inside an account.
6. Can you find out who operates it? A named company, a number and an address is a meaningful difference from a logo and a contact form.

We deliberately do not score services against each other. The data that would be needed, reliable figures on speed, losses and disputes across thousands of orders, is not public for any of them, and a ranking built on anything less is a guess with a number attached.

Signals worth taking seriously

Whatever service you use, the warning signs are consistent:

• No named operator. If no company, number or address appears anywhere, there is nobody to address a complaint to.
• Policies that contradict each other. Worth noting rather than fleeing from, but the contradictions should be in detail, not in whether money is refundable.
• Pressure to hold a large balance. Money in an account you do not control is the hardest kind to recover.
• Freight quoted far below the market. Carriers charge what carriers charge.
• Silence before you have paid. Support that is slow at the enquiry stage will not be faster once your goods are on a shelf.

On the first of those, Tomebuy does name an operator, a company number and an address, which puts it ahead of a fair number of sites in this field. On the second, it has the contradictions set out in our errata list, and they are in detail rather than in substance.

Choosing for the order in front of you

The answer changes with the order rather than with the service. Several things from one seller and a need for photographs before freight: a purchasing agent earns its place. Goods you already bought, or a gift from a friend: forwarding is cheaper and simpler. One ordinary item the platform will post abroad itself: use the platform. An expensive single piece where authenticity is the whole question: buy from an authorised retailer, because no warehouse photograph settles that.

Where Tomebuy is a poor fitForwarding at TomebuyCommon questions