How to Order on Taobao with CSSBuy (to France, Europe): My Review and Experience 2025
Today, I’m going to show you how to buy on Taobao using a Taobao agent, a middleman who receives Taobao packages and reships them to you anywhere in the world (France, Europe, etc.). The service I use is called CSSBuy, and you can use my affiliate link to sign up, which might get you some coupons.
Why Taobao?
- There are many products that aren’t available on Aliexpress or Temu but only on sites aimed at the Chinese market like Taobao
- Prices on Taobao are lower than on international sites
Cssbuy
CSSBuy is a Taobao agent, meaning they’ll receive Taobao packages for you in China and then send them anywhere in the world, to your home in France or elsewhere. If you have multiple packages, they can consolidate them into one. Packages are stored free of charge in their Chinese warehouse for 90 days, so you have time to collect many packages before the final shipment to France.
Sign up on CSSBuy and click the activation link sent to your email (it’s often in spam).
To make shopping easier, switch to English – EUR at the top right:
Enter the Taobao URL of the item you want to buy in the search bar at the top (to learn how to access Taobao and create a Taobao account, I’ll let you search on Google, there are plenty of articles).
You’ll see a warning about the risk of not being able to return your product (to the Chinese seller).
After choosing the color and quantity, you can “add to cart”.
You’ll notice the price in CNY has been properly converted to euros.
To see if the conversion is favorable, I checked the rates on XE.com and on CSSBuy, the rates aren’t exactly the same, which represents 0.5% more than the actual Chinese price
| Price in CNY | Equivalent in EUR on XE.com | Equivalent in EUR on CSS Buy |
|---|---|---|
| 158 CNY | 18,97€ | 19,06€ |
| 143 CNY | 17,17€ | 17,25€ |
After adding items to your cart, you need to select the products you want to buy before clicking “proceed to checkout”.
There, remember to request photos (not selected by default) (“take photos” / “free pictures”). Depending on the product type, you can choose to remove unnecessary packaging (“remove packaging”).
At this point, you have several payment options. Either you top up your account with money in advance. In that case, fees are already calculated at the time of top-up (4% of the amount + 2.5 CNY + a few euros depending on the amount).
Or you pay exactly what you owe at the time of each purchase. Personally, I choose “visa EUR”, with my international card, the fees are the same. I use a virtual card on Revolut for payments, you can also use the virtual card from Boursobank. With these fees, my order of €36.32 turns into €39.17, just for purchase and reception fees. We’re not talking about shipping yet.
Because we still don’t know exactly how much we’ll pay for shipping. There’s a link to estimate shipping costs, but you mainly need to know the weight and dimensions of the package, and frankly, we don’t know that.
When the package arrives at their warehouse in China, you’ll receive a message and possibly photos. You need to select the products to ship in one package and click “Ship Orders”.
They offer a “rehearsal” where they’ll pack the package and then charge you the exact shipping price. But this service costs an extra €1.13.
Or you pay the estimate right away. If you end up overpaying, the difference will be added to your wallet.
Personally, I chose TYG-MINI-Tariffless Express:0-5KG, I don’t know if it’s the right choice but it’s the fastest for me, and “tariffless” means we won’t have to pay customs fees. For customs, I declared the package value at $19. To see details of each shipping method, click the arrow near “final price”.
I paid €17.46, but ultimately when the package was actually shipped, it was lighter than expected, so the difference was refunded to my “wallet”, which I can use for future orders.
Timeframes
As for timeframes, here are the dates:
- Day 1: order & payment
- Day 3: parcel arrived at CSSbuy
- Day 4: shipping request & payment (a Friday)
- Day 8 (a Tuesday): parcel sent from China
- Day 25: the parcel arrived, no customs fees to report, as it was routed through Germany
The parcel is crushed and mishandled, but fortunately the contents were unharmed. I received my tea infuser as well as the little gifts left by the seller.
So for a product worth 159 CNY (19.11 euros), including CSS fees, shipping costs, etc., I paid 34.62 euros and it took a month!!!
