TaoBao Order

Min Lin from XinCheJian has offered to help order and route parts from TaoBao to western hackerspaces.

These orders will have to be in high volume for low price parts: think 1000+ LEDs, transistors; 100+ cables, etc.

How to find stuff on TaoBao

TaoBao is the Chinese equivalent of eBay. Like on eBay, or maybe even more so, there are scam offers. There are several ways to reduce the risk of being scammed; following the procedure below should give you a good start.

1. go to http://translate.google.com and translate the term you're searching for into Simplified Chinese. Copy the result. Often there are several results; you might have to repeat the following steps for them.
2. paste the result into http://taobao.com and hit search.
3. use the google translate extension for chrome to translate the result page.
4. possibly limit your results by using the categories block on the top of the results.
5. observe your results - do they match what you were looking for? You might have to use different search terms to broaden or limit your search. Look at the Chinese description text of results that match your objective to refine your search terms. Repeat searching until you have a set of results you are comfortable with. You will have hundreds, usually.
6. Do not sort by price. That will sort the scammers up top. Try sorting by "Sales": this will sort items to the top that have been bought recently by other people as well, thereby leveraging the swarm intelligence of buyers.
7. depending on the item you're searching for (especially for more expensive things), you might want to filter results for 7-day-return policy. Vendors that offer 7 day return will have to deposit money with TaoBao, so chances they are scammers are lower. Some items will be sold on Tmall, which is the professional outlet of TaoBao. Vendors there might be even more credible.
8. Use common sense when selecting items: stuff in China is way cheaper (50% - 10% of western prices is not uncommon), but if there is one offer that is unreasonably cheaper than the rest, be aware that it might be a scam.
9. Check if the seller might be credible. Be aware that any of the following properties might have been faked. Use enhanced common sense.
   1. Look at the item description (electronic components rarely have a description though).
   2. Read the Evaluations for the item/seller. Look at the time line of the evaluations.
   3. Look at the average performance rating of the seller. They are rated on a scale from 1 to 5 for accuracy, service and speed. 5 is best. TaoBao also compares the vendor to his peers (selling similar items) and shows the result in a percentile. RED in China means GOOD. So, a vendor with 4.9 and 40% RED on service is very good. 4.3 with GREEN 10% means not really good.
   4. Look at the vendor's credit (as a seller, not as a buyer!): more hearts is good, more diamonds better, more crowns even better, etc.
10. win! note down multiple items, because sometimes the vendor might not have the item in stock. If you like a vendor or know that the vendor is credible (we'll publish a list below), you can browse their store to find items so that you can combine shipping etc.

Collect!

Let's slowly collect what we think would be useful to have:

• Banana plugs http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=3381426784