When searching for a specific item, you can sometimes find similar items being offered by several different sellers. How do you decide which seller to buy from? You can easily find out how details of a seller on Taobao. Since Taobao searches also includes items from Tmall sellers, and a different system is used for rating Tmall and Taobao sellers, choosing a seller can quickly get complicated. This guide will show you how to find out details of sellers easily on both Taobao and Tmall, and how to choose the most trusted sellers.
Taobao sellers come from all walks of life, since anyone can sell on Taobao, after giving Taobao their personal information. Sellers can operate from their home offices, or from a physical store front. You can find out more about a seller who is selling an item you are interested in buying by scrolling down, and tapping on the seller's nickname as shown below.
This will take you to the seller's shop, where you can see all products being offered by the seller. Click on the details of shop, as shown below, to get more information about the seller.
Here you will see the details of the seller. The picture below will breakdown each part of the seller's details, and the meaning of each section.
For every good review the seller gets, the seller receives a trust point. Similarly, for every bad review, the seller gets a trust point deducted. For every neutral review, the seller does not receive any trust point, or gets any trust points deducted. This table shows the different badge icons the sellers get according to the number of trust points they accumulate. A gold medal, in the picture above, is given to a seller when the seller consistently gets good reviews for some time, as a form of recognition that the seller is trustworthy.
Seller's Product Description Accuracy Rating, Customer Service Rating and Item Shipping Speed Rating has a maximum of 5 points. Text in red indicates that seller's rating is higher than the average of all sellers who are selling similar types of products, grey indicates that seller's rating is same as the average of all sellers selling similar products, while text in green indicates seller's rating is lower than the average of all sellers selling similar products.
Tmall sellers are different from Taobao sellers in that Tmall sellers are usually registered companies, and Tmall sellers have to pay 10k RMB to open an online store in Tmall, while Taobao sellers do not have to pay to open shop. All Tmall sellers are required to offer a 7-day guarentee exchange/refund policy for their items, while exchange/refund policy of Taobao sellers are up to each individual seller. The picture below shows how to differentiate between Taobao and Tmall sellers on the search page.
You can choose to see only Tmall sellers, only Taobao sellers, or see all sellers, irregardless of whether they are Taobao or Tmall sellers. The default option is set to see both Taobao and Tmall sellers. You can choose to see only Taobao sellers, only Tmall sellers, or see all sellers by clicking on the tabs, as shown in the picture below.
You can check out the details of a Tmall seller using the same way as you used to check out the details of a Taobao seller. A Tmall seller does not have the trust rating system, but do have Product Description Accuracy Rating, Customer Service Rating and Item Shipping Speed Rating, which are rated in the same way as that of a Taobao seller.
Choosing a seller is important when buying your items. Therefore, it is necessary that you have an idea of how to choose a seller. We recommend choosing a Taobao seller with at least 3 hearts for Trust Rating, and at least a score of 4.4 in all Product Description Accuracy Rating, Customer Service Rating and Item Shipping Speed Rating. For Tmall sellers, we recommend that they have at least a score of 4.5 in all Product Description Accuracy Rating, Customer Service Rating and Item Shipping Speed Rating. Most sellers, whether Taobao or Tmall, aim to please the customer (You!), since you are prepared to spend money to buy from them.
There are some bad sellers who are the black sheeps of the herd out there who are irresponsible and send out spoilt items, are sloppy when communicating with their customers, are very slow in sending out items, or are totally not responsive and refuse to send out items. However, these 'bad' sellers generally have lower than 3 hearts for Trust Ratings, and get a score of 4.2 and below for all the other ratings, and are few and far between.
Watch out for sellers with ratings for product description rating, service rating and item shipping speed which are below 4. These are usually an indication of an sellers which you want to avoid buying from.
To ensure you are getting a more accurate idea of the item you are buying, check out our item review guide, which can be used side by side with checking out a seller.