Ten stations between a link and your door, exits marked
How to buy through a China agent, step by step, written the way a fire marshal reads a building: the route matters, but the exits matter more. At each step below, the grey line names the undo door still open at that point.
The ten stations every order passes
The six ledger desks label their stages differently, but the route is the same everywhere. Here it is end to end; the stations are numbered because the undo doors are keyed to them.
- 1
Pick the item
From this spreadsheet or a community find; exit: walk away free.
- 2
Paste the link and pay
The desk quotes item plus domestic freight; exit: cancel, full refund.
- 3
Desk purchases
A mainland account pays the seller; exit narrows to seller goodwill.
- 4
Seller ships domestically
Two to five days typically; exit: still seller goodwill.
- 5
Stock-in and QC
Photos land in your account; the return clock starts HERE.
- 6
Decide and consolidate
Add items, request extra photos, or return inside the window.
- 7
Submit the parcel
Pick a line, declare value; one desk still lets you cancel here.
- 8
Desk packs and bills
Volumetric maths happens; pay the international leg.
- 9
International transit
Exits become claim windows with hard deadlines.
- 10
Sign for it
Short post-delivery claim windows on some desks; then it is yours.
Stations 5 and 6 are where the whole game is decided: the goods sit still, the photographs exist, and the window is open. Most expensive mistakes are just station-5 days spent not looking.
Station five, slowed down
Getting started is genuinely simple; the subtlety hides at stock-in. The day the status flips (Stocked in, Warehoused, In Warehouse, depending on the desk), three things happen at once: free storage starts counting, the QC set is taken, and the no-reason return window opens.
The windows across the six ledger desks run 5, 5, 5, 7, 7-from-seller-sign and 5 days, each from its own clock, each with its own exclusion list; every figure with its source sits on the undo page.
Practical consequence: never batch-order and leave for a week. Order so that stock-in lands on days you can actually look at photographs.
Submitting the parcel without closing doors
When the warehouse shelf is full enough, you submit a parcel: choose the items, pick a shipping line, declare a value. Three decisions, three ways to lose an exit:
- Line choice fixes your claim terms. Insurance availability, delay compensation and loss payouts are per line; details on the shipping page.
- Declared value fixes your compensation base and your customs story at once. Declaring a tenth of the price saves duty until the box vanishes, then it caps the payout.
- Payment timing matters on one desk: Oopbuy publishes a 5-day parcel-cancellation door after paying (operator notice, read 2026-10-10). The other five publish no equivalent clause, and LoongBuy states plainly that international shipping is a one-time service.
The undo checker evaluates exactly this: your desk, your station, your item class, and which doors are still open.
The last leg and the short clocks after it
From dispatch onward every remedy is procedural. The desks publish lost-parcel criteria (no carrier scan for 45 days on air routes at one desk, 75 for sea), claim deadlines as short as 3 days after receipt, and per-kilogram compensation tables.
Two habits cover most of it: film the unboxing before any knife touches the box, and file claims in writing inside the published window, not in chat.
Each desk’s claim clauses, with read dates, are collected on the undo page under the dispatched and delivered stages.
