Chinese products are not a rare thing to almost anyone in the entire world. If we look around us, literally EVERYTHING is made in China. If it's not, then its parts are made in China. As a girl who enjoys shopping for clothes, a lot of those cute clothes, are of course, made in China. Though I often buy Chinese products, I've never attempted to buy straight from China. Meaning, ordering from the factory, Chinese sellers. There are quite a lot of sites that provides Chinese products straight from the factory like Alibaba, Aliexpress, China Wholesale, etc.

Unrelated to that, I had this one problem. I wear hijab, which requires me to wear long sleeve, long skirt or trousers everyday. And I fully realized that the clothing items I brought from Japan doesn't suit Indonesian climate. I often wear inner long sleeved shirt with outer like tunic, or short sleeved one piece. Which means I, just like any other hijabi in this country needs inner long sleeved shirts to wear daily. Unfortunately the ones made in Indonesia are super fugly. They are so boxy and the materials used to make it is too hot for the climate here.

One day, at ITC Kuningan, I found Zara's long sleeve t-shirt knock-offs and they used a very thin cotton fabric which makes it really comfortable to wear. It's a bit expensive (IDR 60K) if we compare it with general hijabi's inner shirts in Indonesia (around IDR 30K), but other than the price, to me it is perfection. I don't think I'm that tall, but I guess I'm taller than average Indonesian people, and I have long arms, and the sleeves and the hem of this shirt is long, and I love it. It's available in A LOT of colors which makes me happy. Since then, every time I went to ITC Kuningan, I buy other color that I don't have yet til they run out of the product. I found another store which has the same thing but they sell it for IDR 150K! So fucking expensive! I bought one from them (the only one left) and going home with a firey passion to find the same product online.

That, was the background story of how I found Taobao. I've searched Aliexpress, but since Aliexpress is tailored for foreign buyers, they are prohibited to sell fake products or knock-offs. I didn't remember how I found Taobao, but I found the shirts that I wanted. I got so excited to see them online, they are available in sooo many different colors, and they cost about IDR 35K each. I know, I know they'll cost so much more after shipping etc, but hey, I bought the exact same shirt for IDR 150K, and I'm sure even with shipping cost, it wouldn't past over 150K. So there I went taking the risk, buying from a Chinese online store, something I've never done before.

Since Taobao is in Chinese, and mostly just for Chinese buyer (which means Chinese languange, Chinese payment methods, won't ship to other country etc) I decided that it's impossible for me to order it myself. So I went to look for Taobao agents. These agents help people from around the world to order something from Taobao. There are lots of Taobao agents out there, and I chose Bhinner.com because the service charge is relatively low compared to other agents I've seen, and the site is cute (yes, it's a deciding factor).

I made a very careful move not to order them too quickly, I read the steps, I looked for reviews, I did simulations before actually buying the products. I also don't want my credit card bill to blow up, so I picked a certain date so that the order is in the next billing cycle.

Overall, Bhinner's service is very good.

First up I chose my shirts and put them on quotes. Bhinner got back to me saying that the black one is out of stock, but others are available. I went to proceed with available colors, and paid them (14 shirts x USD 4.15 = USD 58.1 + 2.91 service charge = USD 61.01 + USD 2.44 paypal charge, USD 63.45 in total).

So Bhinner ordered the shirts for me, but unfortunately the original store canceled several of my orders because they're out of stock. So I got confirmation that out of 14, 3 of the colors that I ordered isn't available and that they refunded me to my Bhinner account. Later on, more and more colors turned out to be unavailable and in the end I only got 9 colors confirmed. It was pretty disappointing, considering they've confirmed the quotation a couple of days before, but I guess that's just how they work. Chinese products sell fast. Plus I'm not going to be surprised if many of them cheats their customer. Bhinner makes up to me by giving me free of service charge fee on my next order. On the other side, I felt somewhat relieved because less products = less shipping cost.

When the products arrived at Bhinner about 5 days later, I have to make second payment for the shipping cost from Bhinner to my country. And since I have some dollars left from refund in my Bhinner account, I only need to add about USD 11 for the shipping cost. Bhinner also provided me with photos of each the products, making sure that those are the items I ordered. They also took a photo of the final package on a scale so I can make sure that the reported weight is true.

All in all, the shirts cost me USD 8.41 each, which I don't mind paying at all. One thing I mind paying is the import duty my stupid country has. I don't know how much it will cost me and I'm dreading to read the letter. Everything under USD 50 won't get taxed, and I've asked Bhinner to set the value of my order to be 30% of the real price, but I'm scared that they'll unwrap it and see 9 new shirts still in plastic and will charge me more :/ I really don't know what to do or expect now. I just hope the package arrives safely and I don't have to pay big tax for it. I'll update when it arrives.