(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