What is Taobao, exactly? Taobao, whose website name translates to “Searching for Treasure Website”, is an online shopping platform similar to eBay and Amazon that is operated by the Alibaba Group. For those of you who have been living under a rock while in China, seemingly everyone in China uses it to find and purchase all types of goods. If you’ve learned to shop online and cringe at the thought of losing the ability of buying from Taobao while abroad, there’s great news!

The great news about Taobao is that customers from abroad can now have access to buying goods from Taobao and have them shipped to an address abroad. This means that those little knickknacks and hard-to-find items you fell in love buying in China, like telephone-cord hair ties for women can now be purchased after moving abroad. In the past, select sellers on Taobao would send products directly using EMS and other courier services, but that meant long lead times for the cheapest shipping options or expensive shipping costs overall. Today, Taobao has created its own in-house logistics program that will aggregate your items to a central warehouse that then packs everything and takes on all facets of the shipping process to you, including shipper couriers, declarations and customs.

To get your items shipped through Taobao’s logistics service, at the end of checking out of an order, instead of selecting a saved domestic address, input your address from abroad and select the option below it to have Taobao use its worldwide logistics service. Now, all items are sent domestically to its warehouse, which it automatically handles on its end.

In addition to being able to buy your goods on Taobao from abroad, you now have the ability to checkout using an overseas payment method, such as using your credit card. What you have to do when at the payments page, is to simply change the Taobao payments selection to an overseas account. With that selected, you may input, use and save your overseas credit card information for future use.