I was unsure whether to put this in Pleo experiences or marketplace but since i'm not actually selling anything I settled on pleo Experiences as the place to post. Apologies if this isn't the right place for this.So with Ucube egg batteries sold out almost everywhere I turned to Taobao.com in a last ditch effort to get one just incase they really are leaving the market forever.
www.taobao.com is a China based website that has over 760 million product listings. Items can be sold at a fixed price or can be put up for auction sort of like a Chinese ebay. Here is the wikipedia page with more info on Taobao and it's history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taobao.
The best way to order from Taobao if you live in the west is using a Taobao agent to do the shopping for you. For my order I chose
http://taobaofocus.com/ . I chose them because I like their cart system and they offer easy to use order calculator and web page translator. They are also one of the few shopping services who take Paypal.
If you browse the internet using Chrome it will attempt to translate Taobao for you automatically, otherwise google translate does a good enough job of it. One thing to remember is that searching for terms in english usually brings up more expensive listings so it good to run your search terms through google translate. With Pleo you can get away with just searching for the term 'Pleo' becuase it is such a short name he is called that in Chinese anyway
As you can see all prices are listed in RMB. Taobaofocus offers a price calculator to convert currency for you.
This is the listing for the egg battery I chose to order from. 350RMB is roughly 68 USD. Note the diamond in the top right corner next to reputation. Sellers with diamonds next to their names are considered more trustworthy than sellers with red hearts or nothing. This seller has 8 batteries remaining in stock with a
in the questions area for restock dates. This means he does not know when or if he will get this item again. When a seller marks their item 99999RMB it usually means the item is sold out or unavailable.
I placed my Order 11/5/11 with taobaofocus. You pay them the money then they order the item for you, check it when it arrives, and then bill you the shipping from them to you. They charge a commision depending on item price.
As of today my order had been ordered form the taobao seller and is awaiting shipment to Focus. I will continue to keep this page updated as my order progresses. Taobao has a few other cute items for pleo like little clothes and a carrying bag so it never hurts to keep an eye out for stuff from there
