Taobao.com for Chinese is like Amazon for the rest of the world. This huge marketplace offers endless items to buy for insane low prices. That's the main reason why it attract not only Chinese people, but also those from other countries. And here comes the catch. Taobao is not in english. But believe us - this is not such a big problem as you might think. Please check our ultimate english guide how to shop on Taobao.com. We will show you, how to register a Taobao account even without Chinese cell phone.
How to open account on Taobao
Please make sure you are on www.taobao.com, not world.taobao.com.
If you are there, just select CHINESE flag, site will redirect to "www"
Here it might become little tricky. Taobao require phone number verification in order to open account. This works even without chinese phone number, you can use your own. Well. If you are lucky and your country is listed there. If not, you need workaround this.
There are two ways how to open account on Taobao even if your country is not supported.
Option a] use some service, which allows you to buy virtual sim card - some sites are listed here. Some of them works, but many of them not, because some people was faster than you and you will get notice, that this number was used for so many accounts, that Taobao won't accept it again. Anyway, for purpose of this tutorial we still were able to find a number, which actually worked.
Option b] order our service "Shop in Person" and we will buy you prepaid sim card in Hong Kong. You can use this phone number for registration. We are not able deliver Chinese sim card, as lately Chinese government require register all users, even for prepaid numbers. Alternatively you can use our service "Taobao registration" - we will setup account for you and your SIM card will be added to your Tiptrans box, so can be send to you as any other package.
Considering both options we strongly recommend you use some unique number if you want shop on Taobao more often. As phone number will be also account ID it's not very secure and smart to use some public shared number.
Note: we were not able finish registration with number from France (even it look is works), so we had to try another one (from England) and that one was OK.
Continue reading - How to select items on Taobao and how to avoid cheaters.