(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