Hello VoltNuts - As some of the VoltNuts live in europe and we see all these nice products on TaoBao - can someone explain the details how to order from Taobao - most of us do cannot read chinese language ... how to become member of Taobao as a customer living in europe and what are the options we have to pay (VISA, PayPal, ... ?)
Fred,
My first experience was with a Taobao "agent" (it was
https://taobaofocus.com/ ), which is an english-language website where you give them the item numbers (from the taobao.com URL), and they buy the items and then ship it to you. This seemed convenient, but they tack on a ~30% fee, and then on top of that you have to pay rather expensive shipping (on top of whatever it cost to have the items shipped to them first). This meant that the salvaged LM399 references I found for ~$3.00 each ended up being the same cost as the ~$6.00 units available on ebay, which defeated the whole point of using taobao.
Next, I used taobao.com directly. I used the translate feature of google chrome to mostly muddle my way through the sign-up process, and creating an alipay account (which is like a chinese paypal), shopping, and placing an order. There were a few screens which chrome didn't seem to be able to translate, and for those I had to install the google translate app onto my iphone, which allowed me to point my phone's camera at my laptop screen and perform the translation. Additionally, there are a lot of taobao listings which have text baked into images, which chrome can't translate, but the phone app can.
In general, there's a very big "I have no idea if this is going to work" aspect to all of this, and you have to be willing to take a risk. For example, my first order was about 5 different items, 3 of which have shipped, and 2 of which have had no response from the seller in about 5 days (pity, one of those was an LT1088 for only $18 -- perhaps that was too good to be true).
Best of luck!