About this 1688 SpreadsheetWho writes it. What supports it.
Meet the editor, review the source documents and see how corrections, referral relationships and updates are recorded.
Who writes this, and what we earn from it
This site is written and checked by Ray Tan, who can be reached at [email protected]. Corrections get a reply, and a correction that comes with the address of a document we missed is the most useful message anyone can send.
The money works like this. We are partners of several shopping agents, and when a reader orders through a link from here we earn a referral fee. The product cards point at a browsing partner, and the same arrangement applies there. None of it costs you anything, and all of it is a reason to read what follows with your eyes open.
We have no relationship with 1688 or Alibaba Group. We are not an agent and not a shop: we take no orders, hold no money, touch no parcels, and have no window into any order you place. If a page here reads as though we could check something for you, the page is wrong.
Being paid by referral and writing about the people who pay us is a conflict, and the only honest response is to constrain what we are allowed to say. So we quote and attribute instead of ranking. You will not find a verdict on which agent is better here, because the only evidence we have is what each of them published, and a document tells you about a document rather than about a warehouse.
The whole bibliography
Every source on this site, and how we reached each one
Four documents, written by three companies. That is the entire evidence base, and the modest size of it is the reason this site covers a narrow subject properly instead of a wide one badly. The dates in the third column are the dates those operators last changed the documents, not the dates we read them.
| Document | Operator | Last modified by them | How we reached it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopping assistant guidance | OrientDig | 2025-06-30 | Opened in a browser at the published address. Five screenshots on this site come from it, and each one carries this document name in its caption. |
| Orientdig user registration agreement | OrientDig | 2025-06-13 | Retrieved through the site data interface rather than as a page. The clean address redirects to the home page, so the agreement is quoted with the address that actually returns it. |
| How LoongBuy Works | LoongBuy | 2026-04-29 | Opened in a browser at the published address. Used for the platform list that disagrees with the one above it. |
| Okeyhaul help centre | Okeyhaul | 2024-04-30 | Opened in a browser. The help centre is a single page application, so every path we tried returned a success code and only a rendered page told us which route was real. |
All four were re-opened against their sources on 2026-10-06 and none of the wording had changed. That date appears in every quotation block on the site, so you never have to come back here to find out how fresh a sentence is.
One figure on this site is not from those four documents, and it is ours. Of the twenty-one agent sites we keep a register of, eleven name this marketplace in their own page title or description. We counted that on 2026-10-06. It is a measurement of what those companies say about themselves, not a test of what any of them actually supports, and we have been careful to describe it that way wherever it appears.
How a page here gets written
The order of work matters more than it sounds, because the commonest way a site like this goes wrong is writing the argument first and looking for evidence afterwards.
The document comes first. A page exists because a sentence exists. If we cannot find anyone who wrote something down on a subject, there is no page about that subject, which is why this site has eight pages rather than thirty.
Quotations are reproduced exactly. Including the typing errors. There is a stray apostrophe in the agreement quoted on the clause page and we left it in, because a quotation you have tidied up is a quotation a reader cannot check against the original.
Every screenshot is opened before its caption is written. Captions get written from the pixels, not from a filename or a memory of what the block said. Two of the screenshots here are controls: blocks that mention no platform at all, included so you can see what an ordinary tips line looks like next to one that singles a marketplace out.
Outbound addresses are opened before they are published. Every link in the table above was requested and returned a page. We do not guess at address formats, which is how the single page application listed above nearly got a citation that pointed nowhere.
Numbers are refused by default. One shipping figure appears on this site, attributed to the operator who published it, and the reasoning is set out on shipping and fees. Everything else that changes weekly is left to the party that can keep it current.
Last updated, and what changed
This page is where changes get recorded. A static site with no visible history is a site you have to take on trust, and the whole argument here is that you should not have to.
- 2026-10-07. Local design review: category directory, mobile navigation, page contents, accessible FAQ and minimum-order checker. This revision is awaiting preview approval.
- 2026-10-06. Initial local edition. Four source documents retrieved and quoted, five screenshots cropped from one of them, and the sixteen browsing categories checked against the browser they point at.
Three things will cause an entry to be added here. If a quoted document changes, we re-quote it and move the date, rather than leaving the old wording with a new date on it. If a document disappears, we say so on the page that depended on it instead of keeping a citation that leads nowhere. And if a reader shows us a document that answers one of the open questions on the FAQ, that question moves out of the table of gaps and into the answered list, with the source named.
What will not change is the shape of the argument, because it does not depend on anything volatile. An operator wrote a paragraph about one marketplace into its agreement. That paragraph says less is owed there than elsewhere. A reader who knows that before paying makes better decisions than one who finds out afterwards. Everything on this site is in service of that one sentence.