There are a lot of online shopping platforms across the globe, but one popular site that caught my attention after coming to China from Ghana is Taobao. China's largest online shopping platform, Taobao is known for being very user-friendly, especially if you can read Chinese characters.

I love their services as they are committed to making it a pleasurable experience for the shopper. If you cannot speak Chinese, or you have difficulties with Taobao's English translation, ask a friend to search for your desired items, talk with the Taobao seller and provide as much detailed information as possible. As with all marketing strategies worldwide, you are enticed to buy as much as possible. One tricky thing with Taobao is that if you only want to buy based on the picture you see without taking the trouble to understand what is written, you could end up making a big mistake!

Once I bought a dress. From the picture shown on the site, it was a top and a skirt. I did not bother to translate the Chinese characters to confirm that my purchase was exactly what I wanted, and just went ahead and placed the order. After a few days, I received a text message indicating that my package had arrived. I joyfully opened the parcel and, to my surprise, found that it was only the top part of the garment. I was so furious that I went back to the site to translate the Chinese characters related to the dress. I was shocked to see that it did in fact refer only to the top of the dress. I blame myself for not translating before buying. Also, because the sellers are supposed to display the pictures of their products, I thought I was buying exactly what I saw, not realizing that it was misleading.

Another frustrating aspect of shopping before I became conversant with the language and could verbally communicate with the sellers was that the site's auto-translators do not provide an accurate definition of the characters. It is a huge mountain to climb trying to express yourself coherently with the auto-translator. At times, I would spend hours trying to reach mutual understanding with the seller via translation, which was a great waste of time.

As I stated above, Taobao has great services in place which really make customers feel at home shopping on their platform. One of the features I especially like is the ability to return a product for replacement or refund. There are also times that items go missing, and you need to track or communicate with the seller to find the location of your parcel. In this case too, both parties can have difficulties in understanding each other. Sometimes if you can speak some of the language, the sellers think that it is a fellow Chinese on the other side of the phone and will just send you a tracking code to track your product. The interesting thing is you don't even know where to start to track it.

To really enjoy another country's culture or what they do, or to find going about day-to-day activities easy, we must all be willing to learn a little bit of the host country's language or understand some basics of the culture. Interestingly, because I constantly buy from Taobao, I have become familiar with most of the Chinese characters; hence I don't use an auto-translator anymore but can now just directly place orders. I have become very familiar with most of the features on Taobao as well.

For me personally Taobao is the best, but as a popular online shopping site that the international community can use, it would be of great benefit to have English or other language options to assist people unfamiliar with Chinese as they shop.

The author is a Ghanaian studying in Jiangsu

Copyedited by Francisco Little & Laurence Coulton

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