(niche posting) apparently it's possible to buy directly from 1688 using foreign credit cards now.... interesting......
but ofc there is still no international shipping so I would still need to use an agent for forwarding. so maybe there's not much point vs just using a full-service purchasing agent

it would be nice to deal directly with sellers instead of using a middleman, but then that also means i would have to deal with the language barrier myself, and any other issues that might be harder to solve from out-of-country...

apparently the CC option has issues so i have been setting up alipay and worldfirst instead. i still don't know if i'll actually go through with a purchase but i had to do a ton of verification to get this far. the alibaba group now has pretty much every piece of identifying information about me

still better them than the americans

i'm still on the verge of doing this... still kind of "aah what if things go wrong and my shit gets stuck in China and i can't do anything about it"
but then what's the worst case scenario I suppose. I might lose 50 quid. It still wouldn't be the stupidest way I've lost 50 quid

today's stupid problem: wanted to install 1688 android app which is available in Eng but only on google play & it is region blocked in the UK. Versions from other sources are Chinese only. I tried installing the eng version through Aurora but it refuses to launch if not installed from the play store

well I did it I placed the order
after all the pissing around setting up worldfirst it simply did not appear as an option at checkout and I have no idea why so i used credit card anyway 🤷
let's hope this all works...!!

The seller messaged me saying their store was temporarily unavailable due to reasons & could I please buy from this other one instead so I had to cancel the original order and get a refund
Apparently refunds were an issue with foreign CCs before but it seems to have been processed so... we go again

One thing that's kind of unfortunate tbh is that Chinese business hours align almost perfectly with UK sleeping hours so if they contact me at the start of their work day I can only really reply at the end