Where each term actually sits in the order

What a shopping agent is, in one paragraph

A shopping agent is a company in China that buys an item on your behalf from a Chinese seller, receives it at its own warehouse, and later ships it to you. You pay it twice: once for the goods, once for the international leg.

That arrangement exists because most Chinese sellers do not ship abroad and do not accept foreign cards. The agent is the party that holds a domestic address and a domestic payment method. Everything else these companies offer, photographs, storage, consolidation, route choice, is built on top of that one function.

Two consequences follow and they surprise almost everyone the first time. Your item goes to a warehouse in China before it goes anywhere near you, so the first parcel is domestic and fast and invisible to you. And the price of the second leg cannot be known until the first parcel arrives and gets weighed, which is why no honest quote exists at the moment you press buy.

How to use a catalogue and an agent together, step by step

The two sites do different halves of the job and it helps to know which half you are in.

1. Find candidates in a catalogue

   Browse a category or search a word. You are collecting possibilities here, not deciding anything. Nothing on a catalogue page can be bought from the catalogue.

2. Follow one through to the agent

   The link hands the item to a service that can price it. Expect to sign in at this point, because an order has to belong to somebody.

3. Read the listing, not the card

   Measurements, materials and seller notes live here and nowhere else. This is the step people skip and then regret.

4. Pay for the goods, then wait

   The agent buys from the seller and the item travels to the warehouse. Nothing is owed for shipping yet.

5. Submit the parcel and pay the second time

   You choose what goes in the box and which route it takes, and only now does a real shipping price exist.

If you can hold that split in your head, most of the confusion in this hobby disappears. A catalogue that cannot quote shipping is not broken. An agent that will not price a parcel before it arrives is not stalling.

QC, GL, RL and the rest, in plain words

QC is the one you will meet first and the only one of the three that companies themselves use. It stands for quality control, and in practice it means the photographs taken of your item at the warehouse after it arrives and before it ships. Several of the homepages read for this site put a number of free photographs in their process strips; the numbers were not the same, which is why this page quotes none of them as a general rule.

GL and RL are different animals. They are community shorthand, passed around in chat groups and shared lists, and they are most often expanded as green light and red light: a batch a group considers worth ordering, and one it does not. No agent issues them, no body defines them, and different groups apply them to different things. Treat them as one person opinion with a label on it, and when somebody uses either at you, ask what they meant.

Two more you will see constantly. Storage is the period a warehouse will hold your goods before charging you to keep them, and the promised length differed across the homepages read here. Line or route means one carrier option for the international leg, and services compete partly on how many of them they offer.

Exchange rates, and why the number keeps moving

Chinese sellers price in yuan. You almost certainly do not hold yuan. Somewhere between those two facts a conversion happens, and where exactly it happens decides what you pay.

Three rates can be involved and they are rarely equal. There is the rate you see quoted in the news, which nobody actually transacts at. There is the rate the agent applies when it shows you a price in your own currency. And there is the rate your card issuer or payment provider applies when it takes the money, sometimes with its own fee folded in. The amount that leaves your account is set by the last of the three.

This site prints no rates and no conversion tables, on purpose. Any figure published here would be wrong within hours and would look authoritative while being wrong, which is worse than saying nothing. What is stable enough to be worth writing down is the mechanism: check which currency you are being quoted in, check whether the service or your bank is doing the conversion, and compare the amount that actually left your account against the amount you were shown.

Quality control photographs: what they are for

When your item reaches the warehouse, somebody takes it out of the seller packaging and photographs it. Those pictures are the only look you will get before the item leaves China, and they are the whole reason this arrangement is tolerable at a distance.

They exist at a specific moment for a specific decision. The item is in the warehouse, it has not been packed for export, and you are being asked whether to send it on or deal with it now. Once you approve and the parcel is packed, the conversation gets much harder, because the goods are then in a box with other goods heading for another country.

How many photographs you get, whether they cost anything, and how long you have to respond are all things each service sets for itself. Several homepages read for this site advertised a number of free photographs in their process strips, and the numbers differed between companies. That is one of the few genuinely comparable things on those pages, and it is worth checking against a help centre article rather than a badge.

How to read a QC photograph, in a fixed order

Most people open these pictures, think the item looks fine, and approve. A better habit is to go looking for specific things in a fixed order, because you are much more likely to notice something you were hunting for.

• The label first. Size, composition and care symbols are printed on it, and comparing the label against the listing catches the commonest problem, which is the wrong variant being sent.
• Count the pieces. If the listing described a set, count what is on the table. Missing accessories are far more common than defects.
• Ask for a measurement, not an opinion. A tape measure across the chest settles a fit question that no amount of looking will.
• Look at the seams and the hardware. Stitching and zips photograph badly at low resolution, so ask for a close frame rather than squinting at a wide one.
• Say what you want to happen. If something is wrong, write the specific outcome you are asking for. A message saying only that you are unhappy generates a reply asking what you want.

You are allowed to ask for more pictures, and asking is much cheaper than accepting an item you are unsure about. The expensive moment is after the parcel has been packed for export.

The second parcel, and the choice inside it

Once you approve your items, you submit a parcel: you choose which of the things sitting in the warehouse travel together, and which carrier takes them. This is the point where a real shipping price appears, because now there is a real box with a real weight.

Route choice is a trade between speed, cost and what a carrier will accept. Some routes will not take liquids, batteries or aerosols. Some are dramatically cheaper and dramatically slower. Volume matters as well as weight, so a light bulky coat can cost more than something heavier and denser.

Two things then happen that are outside your service control. Your country decides whether to charge duty or tax on the parcel, on its own rules, and the declared value on the paperwork feeds into that. And a courier in your country does the final delivery. If a parcel stalls after it has cleared customs, the service that shipped it usually cannot do much beyond showing you the same tracking you already have.

Nothing about duty rates or delivery times appears on this page, because both depend on where you live and both change. Ask your own customs authority, not a shopping site, and not this one.