My Taobao Experience II

Update:
Taobao Experience I on Lequgou
Taobao Experience III on 65Daigou and Peeka
Taobao Experience IV on Skycart
65daigou and feedback section

Previously I blogged about my experience on Taobao, using Lequgou as my forwarder. Some of the key advantages that I have mentioned was mainly because it didn't liase with Singpost for delivery and that the base charge was CNY35 (it was CNY40 the second and third time I used it). 

Fast forward to today... (and it really hasn't been long jeez...)

LQG increased their price to CNY43 for the 1st kg and CNY 15 for the subsequent KG.

Now this is completely ridiculous. 

Here we have 4PX tying with our national postal service and it is charging CNY3 lesser. 

This may not mean a lot to us EXCEPT

The price that LQG listed was unjustified

At CNY40/12 I can tolerate that I often need to spend the whole day on Aliwangwang to sort out logistical issues like parcels containing special goods or missing items. In addition, back then there was a huge jam up at Shenzhen/Hong Kong customs. 4PX and PRouter were both based in Guangzhou/Shenzhen and there were some horrible delay about a month? So I opted LQG because it was based in Shanghai and I didn't experience delays and in fact shipments were completed earlier than expected.

But now they increased the price more than what the 'so-called' official 4PX cost (I say official cuz it partners with Singpost la) then that's rather ridiculous.

So with that PRouter essentially became the cheapest provider as one of the three official Taobao forwarder. Does that mean you should choose PRouter then?

This was Dragonlink, one of PRouter's main courier representative in Singapore. 

The good news is PRouter is not using Dragonlink anymore (not that I know of..)
and I happily tried PRouter after the fiasco.

Kthxbye.




lol!
Ok here is the tracking picture of one of my parcels

The only @#%@%$ part was the customs part which took about 4 days in HK and Singapore. 

On the 18th I received an SMS from XDEL to pick my preferred delivery date. They had 4 dates (cannot remember all the exact dates) and the earliest was 20th Nov so I picked that. By picking either of the choices there, you will have to wait for the whole day at home (or where you are shipping your parcels to). You can pay extra about $5 to choose your most desired date and timing (e.g. maybe 12-3pm instead of the whole day 9-6pm). Some people were not happy about this since they have to pay 'extra', but my experience with LQG which doesn't notify, and Singpost (for 4PX) generally do not notify me when my Vpost shipments are on the way to my house, so I see no reason why we should complain about the $5 thingy. Anyway that's just me. 

Nothing was missing, but my general conversations with PRouter CSO were a lot faster than than LQG's so that's a plus. I have officially moved over to PRouter's camp so...

till the next price increase! Then we will see again :)

Next post will be about my experiences with Peeka and 65Daigou ~ 

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