1688 SpreadsheetFind a product. Check the order.

Browse by category, then check minimum quantities, inspection limits and shipping terms before buying through an agent.

Start with a category

Find a product, compare its listing and keep the link for your agent.

Does your quantity meet the minimum?

Copy the minimum order quantity from the supplier’s listing. Compare it with the number of items you want before submitting an order.

This checks quantity only. Confirm whether the supplier applies its minimum per variant or across the whole order.

What to check on a listing

Supplier minimum

Your quantity

Use whole items, from 1 to 1,000,000.

Enter quantities to compare them.

What a 1688 Spreadsheet is, and what it is not

A 1688 Spreadsheet is a browsing site: product cards grouped by category, each one pointing at a listing you can hand to a shopping agent. It is a way to find things. It is not a shop, and it is not the agent. Nothing on a browsing site takes your money, holds your parcel, or answers your support ticket.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because every promise about your order lives somewhere else: in the terms of whichever agent you picked. A browsing site can show you a jacket. Only the agent can tell you what happens if the jacket arrives torn, and on 1688 orders several of them have written that answer down differently.

And 1688 is a marketplace, not an agent

1688 is a wholesale marketplace operated by Alibaba Group and aimed at buyers inside mainland China. Its listings are written in Chinese, priced in yuan, and sold on domestic terms: sellers expect a buyer with a Chinese address, a Chinese payment method, and usually an order bigger than one piece.

A shopping agent closes all three of those gaps. It buys in its own name, receives the parcel at a Chinese warehouse, and ships the result to you. That is the service you are paying for, and most of it works the same whichever Chinese site the link came from. The interesting part is the handful of places where it does not.

The short version

The paragraph that treats 1688 differently

Agents accept 1688 links. One of them, OrientDig, also wrote a separate paragraph into its registration agreement covering what it does and does not owe you on those orders. In four sentences it declines to guarantee the quality of the goods, declines to promise the stock figure is accurate, limits inspection to sampling, limits after-sales, and then offers a paid service for buyers who want more than that.

A help page tips block of two round bulleted lines on white. The first says the original product link supports URLs from Chinese shopping sites such as Taobao, Tmall, 1688 and Weidian. The second says a link from a site not listed above should go through the DIY Orders method instead. — The supported list is the easy part. 1688 sits in it, beside Taobao and Tmall, and the order form reads those links without being asked twice. Screenshot from Shopping assistant guidance, OrientDig, last modified 2025-06-30.

Being on that list is where the support ends and the carve out begins. The list is in a help page anyone can read; the carve out is in a registration agreement almost nobody opens. We quote it in full, word for word, on the clause page, with the address you can check it at.

This is not an argument against ordering from 1688. It is an argument for knowing, before you pay, which parts of the usual service you are not getting, so you can decide whether that trade is worth it for the thing you actually want.

Before you order on 1688, three things are already decided

None of these are surprises hiding in the small print of a single agent. They are consequences of the kind of marketplace 1688 is, and they are settled before your money moves.

Quality is nobody's promise. The agent buys what the listing describes. In its own words it does not guarantee the quality of the goods and inspects only by sampling. The seller, for its part, never agreed to sell to you. Read the wording.
The stock number may not be real. One agent states plainly that it does not provide an accurate inventory service for these orders, which means an in stock listing can still turn into a refund days later.
You may not be able to buy just one. Suppliers on 1688 commonly set a minimum order, and the agent will tell you to check it before ordering rather than check it for you. What that looks like in practice.

Each of those has something you can do about it, which is the part most write ups skip. Sampling inspection is weaker than full inspection, but it is not nothing, and knowing what the photos will and will not show changes how you choose a listing in the first place. That is on the checks page.

Why this site prints no prices, rates or delivery windows

Almost every guide to ordering from China leads with numbers: a service fee, an exchange rate, a shipping estimate, a number of days to your door. Those numbers are the first thing a reader wants and the first thing to go stale. A static page cannot track them, and a wrong number is worse than no number, because a reader will plan around it.

So this site carries exactly one figure, a shipping window quoted from an agent help centre with the operator named and the date that page was recorded, and it is written as their claim rather than our estimate. You can read it, and the reason it is the only one, on shipping and fees.

What is left when you take the numbers out is the part that does not change weekly: which platforms an order form accepts, what inspection you are promised, what an agent has committed to in writing, and where the commitment stops. That is a smaller subject, and it is one a page like this can actually get right.

We also tell you when to use a different source. For live rates, fees and parcel tracking, go to the agent you are actually using and read their own dashboard. For what they have promised you in writing, stay here.