Shipping, fees and exchange ratesCheck the second payment.
Separate domestic dispatch from international shipping, then confirm your route, checkout total and import requirements before paying.
The only number here
The only shipping window on this site, and whose claim it is
This site carries one figure. It is not ours, it is not an average, and it is not an estimate for your parcel. It is a sentence a shopping agent published in its own help centre, and we reproduce it with the operator named so you can weigh it as what it is: one company describing what it usually sees.
Okeyhaul, in its help centre, on how quickly a domestic seller dispatches:
Domestic platforms like Taobao TMALL 1688 typically ship within 3 to 7 days, except for some customized or pre-sale items. For platform-operated products, they can be shipped on the same day. For non-operated products, those from affiliated merchants may take 3 to 5 days to ship.
Quoted from Okeyhaul help centre, Okeyhaul, last modified 2024-04-30. We re-opened it on 2026-10-06 and the wording had not changed.
Read the scope carefully, because it is narrower than it looks. That window describes the seller getting the parcel moving inside China, towards the agent warehouse. It is not the time to your door, it does not include inspection, it does not include the days your parcel waits while you decide to ship it, and it does not include the international leg or customs.
The qualifier matters as much as the number. The sentence says typically, and then immediately carves out customised and pre-sale items, which on a wholesale platform is not a rare category. Treat it as an observation with exceptions attached, not a service level you can hold anyone to.
We have not found a comparable published figure for the international leg from any agent whose documents we read, so there is no second number on this page. If you want one for planning, the agent you are actually using will quote the route when you book it, and that quotation is live where ours would be stale.
What the agent says it cannot control
The second half of the shipping story is written down more plainly than the first. One ordering guide puts a block at the shipping step listing what can go wrong in transit and stating, before you pay for anything, that these events are outside its reach.
Source excerpt
OrientDig, in that block. These are the first two of its three sentences:
International package shipments come with the risk of accidents such as delays, confiscation, taxes, damage, and missing packages. OrientDig cannot control or prevent such incidents, which may occur during the handling of the package by a third-party logistics company or customs.
Quoted from Shopping assistant guidance, OrientDig, last modified 2025-06-30. We re-opened it on 2026-10-06 and the wording had not changed.
The third sentence is the counterweight and we are reporting it rather than quoting it, because quoting it would drag a piece of marketing language onto a page that has none. In it, OrientDig says it will inform you about the shipping situation for your selected country and assist you in case of any issues. That is a commitment to communicate and to help. It is not a commitment to make you whole.
Notice that this block applies to every order, whatever platform the link came from. Nothing in it is specific to 1688, which is exactly why it is worth reading next to the clause that is. The transit risk is the same for everyone. What differs by platform is the service you were promised before the parcel reached the carrier, and that is on the clause page.
Before you book
Customs, taxes and the parts no agent will quote you
Three things decide what the second leg costs and how long it takes, and an agent controls exactly one of them.
The route. Agents sell a list of shipping options with different carriers, speeds and limits, and the list differs by destination country. This is the one part the agent sets, and the one part where a live quotation exists: you see the price for your actual parcel weight and address at the moment you book. That is why we do not print shipping costs here. Any figure we published would be wrong for most readers and stale for the rest.
Your country. Duties, import thresholds and the paperwork a carrier must file are set by your government, change without reference to any agent, and are charged to you rather than to the agent. The tips block above names taxes as a risk and stops there, which is the honest position: an operator in China is not in a position to tell you what your customs authority will do.
What is in the box. Some goods cannot travel on some shipping routes at all. Batteries, liquids, powders and magnetised items are the usual categories, and the restriction sits with the carrier rather than the agent, which is why the same item can be shippable one week and not the next.
The practical consequence is that the shipping stage rewards asking before buying. If you already know the item is a liquid or a device with a battery inside, the time to find out whether it can leave at all is before the agent buys it, not after it is sitting in a warehouse you are paying storage on.
No exchange rate is printed here, and the reason is not modesty
A 1688 listing is priced in yuan. You will pay in your own currency, and somewhere between those two facts a conversion happens, usually twice: once when the agent charges you for the goods, once when it charges you for shipping. People reasonably want to know what that exchange rate is before they commit.
We do not publish one, and the reason is specific rather than cautious. An agent exchange rate is set by the agent, applied at the moment of payment, and not always identical to the mid-market rate you would look up. A static page cannot track it. A figure typed here today would be a number readers plan around and we could not keep true, which is a worse outcome than printing nothing.
- Where the real rate is. On the checkout screen of the agent you are using, at the moment you pay. That figure is binding and ours would not be.
- What to compare. Not the headline service fee, but the total the checkout screen shows for the same basket at two agents on the same day. The rate and the fee move together and only the total is comparable.
- What we can tell you. Which commitments each operator has written down, because those are stable enough that a page like this can report them accurately. That is the whole scope of this site, and the about page says how it is kept current.
The same reasoning covers service fee percentages, storage allowances and insurance pricing. Every one of them is a live number owned by somebody else. Repeating a stale copy of it here would make this page feel more complete and make it less useful, which is a trade we are not making.