The practical half: vocabulary, first order, and honest limits
Everything here is the part that is easy to find out and rarely written down in one place.
What Superbuy is, stated plainly
Superbuy is a shopping agent: it buys things in China for you, receives them at its own warehouse, holds them, and ships them on. It does not sell goods. Its About page describes access to more than twenty Chinese marketplaces, and its counterfeit policy states in its own words that it does not sell any products and cannot police third-party sellers, only filter what its own search surfaces.
That distinction decides who is responsible when something is wrong. A defect is the seller's; the warehouse's job is to notice it, document it, and tell you before the parcel leaves. Transit damage is the carrier's, handled through after-sales against each line's compensation standard. Choosing badly is yours, which is why the first two pages of this site are about choosing.
Service runs 09:00–18:00 Beijing time, seven days a week, with [email protected] for ordinary questions, a separate address for reporting counterfeit listings, and an address that reaches the chief executive if an ordinary ticket has stalled.
First order
A first order, in the order the decisions arrive
- Find the item. Use the catalogue or the search box at the top of any page here. Copy the listing link.
- Submit it, and answer the inspection question. Yes means the item is opened where the rules allow, verified against your order and photographed three times. No means only the outer packaging is checked, and the policy puts the risk on you.
- Add only the evidence you need. Check the category first against the packaging standards, because for sealed goods, new sneakers and powered devices the add-on that answers your question is also the one that ends the no-reason return.
- Pay stage one. Item, the seller's domestic courier fee, any service fee for that platform, plus whatever you added.
- Read the photos when they arrive. Within a day of the goods landing. Identity questions first, condition questions second.
- Decide while it is still cheap. A return to the seller is a domestic transaction and is far easier now than after the parcel has crossed a border.
- Submit the parcel. Pick packing, pick a line, pay the estimate.
- Expect a settlement. The carrier fixes the final weight within seven days; you get a refund or a balance payment depending on which way it moved.
Glossary
Vocabulary that appears in prices before it appears in explanations
| Term | What it means here |
|---|---|
| DI | The operator's unit for one stored item line. Storage is billed per DI per day and several services are priced per DI, so the word turns up in every number without ever being defined on the order screen. |
| Standard inspection | The free check: prohibited goods, then style, quantity, colour, size and model against your order, then damage over the published threshold, then three photos. |
| Detailed inspection | The paid version that opens linings and pockets, tries the zip and compares sleeve and leg lengths. |
| QC photos | Community shorthand for the inspection photos. Free ones are the three standard angles; anything else is a detail photo you paid for. |
| Class A and Class B | How 1688 goods are split. Class A gets a sampling inspection of five percent of each ID, between five and twenty pieces. Class B gets none by default. |
| Abnormal parcel | Something that arrived at the warehouse with no order attached or incomplete logistics information. Held sixty days, with no reminders possible. |
| Billed weight | The weight you are actually charged for: on some routes the greater of real weight and volumetric weight. |
| Volumetric weight | Length times width times height divided by the carrier's divisor. Five thousand five hundred on the Hong Kong UPS route, five thousand on DHL. |
| Balance payment | The top-up raised when the carrier's final weight exceeds the estimate by at least one incremental unit. |
| No-reason return | Returning to the Chinese seller without giving a reason, available only while the packaging still meets the published standard for that category. |
FAQ
Frequently asked questions, answered from the policy
Will my items be inspected automatically?
Only if you answer yes to standard inspection when you confirm the order. Answer no and the warehouse verifies and photographs the outer packaging only.
Are sealed products opened?
No. Sealed goods, and non-clothing items with a sealed label or tag, are not opened at the free tier, and the paid services that do open them say in their terms that the seal cannot be restored.
Can the warehouse tell me whether something is genuine?
No. Authenticity is outside every inspection tier, and for electronics the policy names authenticity, functionality and quality together as out of scope.
What if the colour is not what the listing showed?
Colour difference is on the exclusion list by name, along with size discrepancy and actual usage effects. A detail photo will show you the real colour before shipping, which is a decision aid rather than a dispute lever.
I forgot to pick inspection. Is it too late?
No, but it is no longer free. Re-inspection after storage is a paid service with three fresh photos.
How long can goods sit in the warehouse?
Ninety days free, then a tenth of a yuan per item per day up to one hundred and eighty days, after which goods with no shipping order and no reply are disposed of. An extension can be bought in advance.
Does a free gift from the seller reach me?
Yes. Gifts the seller includes belong to you and are stored and shipped with the item. Whether a gift is verified during inspection depends on whether the product page states that one is included.
What happens if the parcel is late?
Nothing, as far as compensation goes. The help centre states that mainstream couriers publish no delay compensation standard, so there is none. Loss and damage are different and follow each line's own standard.
Why use this agent, and when to use a different one
Start with what is true of every agent in this business. They all buy on your behalf, all hold goods in a warehouse, all consolidate, and all make their margin in some mixture of service fee, currency, shipping and extras. None of them manufactures anything, and none can promise that a third-party seller is honest.
What is actually distinctive here is the documentation. The inspection scope is published with a numeric defect threshold, the exclusions are listed rather than implied, every optional service has a price, a turnaround and a written guarantee attached, and the packaging standards that govern returns are printed as a table. That is unusual, and it is the reason this site could be written from sources rather than from anecdote.
And the honest other half. If you want someone to argue with a seller on your behalf in detail, an agent's standard service is not that; the help centre describes communication support, not advocacy. If you are buying one small light item, a seller who ships internationally may well be cheaper than any agent once the first-weight charge is counted. If you need authenticity established, no agent can do it, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something. And if your order is mostly sealed cosmetics or boxed electronics, understand before you start that you are choosing between evidence and returnability on most of the basket.
One nuance on authenticity, because it is the question asked most. No inspection tier establishes it. The help centre does introduce a third-party identification centre, accredited for conformity assessment and specialised in watches, with its own laboratories; the English help centre introduces it and publishes no price or ordering route for it. So the accurate statement is narrow: the warehouse checks condition, a separate organisation exists for watch appraisal, and nothing in between is a guarantee of provenance.
Judging any agent before you send money
Four checks, none of which require a forum opinion. Does the operator publish a legal identity you can look up, and does the same identity appear on more than one page. Is there a filing or registration number in the footer that resolves to something. Are the inspection and return rules written as rules, with numbers and exclusions, or as reassurance. And is there a contact route that ends at a person rather than looping back to a help page.
Applied here, the answers are checkable: a company dated to 2012, the filing number 粤ICP备2021129378号 in every footer, a warehouse stated to be in Guangdong, a published hotline, and three separate email addresses for service, for counterfeit reports and for escalation.
Apply the same four to this site. It names its own funding, dates its facts, and cites the article behind each figure. If a guide will not do that, its numbers are worth exactly what you paid for them.
