Buying Chinese Books Online and Shipping to the US

[mewaters]

Does anyone have experience with buying books from Chinese websites? I want to know if it's possible in general--and if it is, how easy--to buy books from something like the Chinese Amazon.com (do they actually take credit cards?) and then have them shipped to me in New York. The set of books I'm looking for is the latest 《郁达夫全集》which just came out in 2007. The Chinese Amazon-Joyo.com site doesn't have any available, but it seems some online retailers do. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

[flameproof]

User "Elina" runs an online bookshop in Beijing and she will be more then happy to serve you. Her website is: http://studychineseculture.com

[elina]

Flameproof, thanks for your recommendation.

I just checked with our books suppliers in Beijing, three of them have this book in stock. So I just added it to our site:

http://www.studychineseculture.com/book.asp?id=4470

[Stefani]

Yes, I highly recommend Elina's online bookstore. I ordered Conversation Chinese 301 books, CDs and DVDs. I chose the cheapest shipping, and it took 3 months (as described in the website). It is a long time, but I was not in a hurry, so it was my choice.

[smalldog]

I have used dangdang.com to pay for books by credit card and have them shipped to the UK. They charge something like an extra 100% of the cost of the book for air shipping and 40% by sea.

[elina]

Before I wrote my above post, I have already searched on dangdang.com, the book of 《郁达夫全集》 is not in their stock, also out-of-stock on joyo.com.

I’m pretty sure our price is more expensive than dangdang and joyo, the reasons:

1. It’s said dangdang and joyo cannot make money directly from their online business for years, but they don’t care, because they have venture capital and they just want to occupy market quotient at present.

http://www.weaseek.com/2007/12/04/31987567423.htm

根据此间公布的数据，卓越与当当每年亏损额都在数千万元，两家至今仍未盈利(Translation: dangdang and joyo lose money of several ten millions every year)

http://biz.163.com/40623/9/0PI75J6G00020QEF.html

所以不惜以烧掉利润扩充市场份额(Translation: use the method of earning no profit to occupy market quotient)

We have no venture capital and don’t need it, but we need to earn money from every order on our site.

2. We’re Chinese, and use English language on our site/answering our customers enquiries, which can increase our translation/time cost.

Both dangdang.com and joyo.com can accept foreign credit cards and reliable, if one can manage to understand Chinese language, and also the books he/she is looking for are in their stock, the best choice is to buy products on these two online bookstores. Otherwise, I recommend our site, because our price is cheaper than quite a number of overseas online bookshops:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/8024-grammar-vocabulary-texts

By the way, we ever used the name of lovemandarin.com before.

[mewaters]

I don't know Elina, maybe we'll be able to work something out, but your shipping prices seem quite high. I'll get in touch through your website if I'm interested.

[heifeng]

soooo, this is an old thread but has someone ordered from dangdang and shipped to the US recently and changed by credit card. I'm a bit hesitent...hmm. BUT It looks like even if I ship the books I want from China they are cheaper than the local price...hmmm.

[querido]

This doesn't answer you heifeng, but I would like to contribute to the thread.

This is the first time I've noticed elina giving the opinion that dangdang and joyo are reliable. I'll remember that. But, about elina and studychineseculture.com: I wanted a certain collection of children's school books that was complicated to get because not all volumes are available year-round, and because it has been published in a number of editions lately. Because they don't stock it, I shopped around and found most of it at dangdang but I couldn't get my credit card to work there for some unknown reason. So I asked studychineseculture.com if they could get it for me, and they did. They had to round it up from several sources. I appreciated that so much I suddenly decided to get multiple copies to give away as gifts. I haven't received the shipment yet, but I have bought from them several times now with no problems. Lastly, to heifeng and others: they take payment via paypal, which might be slightly less worrisome to some.

I posted to point out that, although I don't know their exact policy, it is likely that studychineseculture.com can get you anything.

[edit]

08OCT09: shipment received, OK.

[end edit]

Edited October 8, 2009 at 07:13 PM by querido

[muyongshi]

JOyo and Dangdang are reliable IN china at least- don't know about to outside. Another place that I know is reliable is chinesebooksusa and if they don't have what you need you could contact them and ask if they can get it. Most of the time they should be able to. They do monthly orders from their suppliers here in China.

[BertR]

Recently a colleague of mine went to China to visit her parents and was willing to bring some books for me when she came back. I wanted to order the books at http://www.studychineseculture.com/ but I noticed that the didn't accept any credit card. They do have Paypal. I tried to use Paypal before and had problems at that time and have seen some bugs which made me distrust their system. Moreover I recently moved back from the US to my motherland and you can't transfer your Paypal account to a address in a different country... To make a long story short, my colleague insisted I tried Dangdang (当当网 ， http://www.dangdang.com/ ）.

We could find all books except one in their database: Boya Chinese-Semi-Intermediate Speed-up (Volume 1)

They do have all other Boya books in there database except this one, quite strange.

Anyway, it could put the other books in my shopping basked, but wasn't able to pay. It wasn't obvious why, but after trying to order a couple of times, we saw that some of the books where not in stock (but we couldn't see which ones, really strange). Anyway with some trial and error with discovered which of the books were available and which weren't and finally I was able to pay with my VISA credit card.

The same day (25 September) I got a email (in Chinese) asking me for parts of my credit card number. I thought this was quite strange since the payment was accented by VISA so I replied them to ask why this was necessary.

Since I didn't get any reply on my mail I sent another one on 28 September and another one on 29 September (to a different email address since they had 2 different email addresses in their mail).

In the meantime my colleague already arrived in China and I believe she tried to phone them quite some times. On 7 October she was able to contact them and they told her that they were closed during the Holidays and I really had to send my credit card info.

On 7 October I did send this information (it wasn't the complete number), but no reply. On 9 October I send the same information the other email address.

On 11 October I got an automatic mail saying my books were sent and on 17 October I got a message from my colleague saying she received the books.

Although I finally got my books, I'm not sure whether I would have gotten them I my colleague wouldn't have called them.

[Caidanbi]

I order Chinese books from YesAsia.com, they are based in the US, and totally safe to shop with. But they don't get everything, mostly entertainment and fiction stuff. I don't like to order from out of the country with my credit card, so unless they take Paypal or something I generally won't do it. I'd love to order from Joyo.com, though, so if anyone has tried it, please let us know how it went

[MekkaNRG]

I'm it didn't look like there was a definite solution here. But if anyone is interested I live in Guangzhou, China and frequently goto the book store. I also, at times, goto Hong Kong so I can get Traditional Character Chinese books. If anyone needs help buying I'd be happy to see what I can do. Just contact me here or send a message to my email from this site.

[jade_dragon_supplies]

Hi there, I run a chinese item shop with my UK husband. I can find any book(s) you want much more cheap than yesasia. Shipping is not very cheap by books are.

If you need anything let me know,

Regards

marta Lee

[roddy]

By way of a quick update and bump to see if we can shake any more coconuts of information out of the tree of members:

Spent a bit of time last night ordering a few books (including 水浒传 thanks to Renzhe and 平凡的世界 thanks to Imron*). I gave up on Amazon.cn when I saw their shipping prices, which are listed here - that amounts to RMB110 per book.

Dangdang worked out much more reasonable - 50% of the list price (ie, undiscounted) with an overall (not per book) minimum of RMB50. The books I bought worked out at about 200RMB shipped from Dangdang, would have been something like RMB600 from Amazon.cn.

That said, Amazon.cn reckons delivery in 15 days, Dangdang says 4 to 8 weeks. I can wait. Amazon also offers a faster airmail service, at a price.

I paid via online banking, so can't comment on using an overseas card. One note though - if you're planning to complete a purchase, fire up Internet Explorer when you're filling your cart. The shopping bit will go fine in any browser, but I had to retrace my steps in IE when the ICBC online payment stage balked at my 山寨 browser.

*More as expressions of support and solidarity rather than any actual intention to read.

[imron]

*More as expressions of support and solidarity rather than any actual intention to read.

Plus they'll look impressive to other people when they see them on your bookshelf. You should also get the Chinese version of Lord of the Rings (you'll have to surreptitiously point it out as visitors are admiring your collection of Chinese books because otherwise they won't be able to read the name) and one of those really thick dictionaries.

Joking aside, if you're in Melbourne, Australia, China Books in the city (http://www.chinabooks.com.au) has Chinese books at reasonable prices.

[Kenny同志]

I think it might be a good idea to buy an e-book reader. It's easier to get Chinese e-books than paper ones outside of China. Plus, e-books are cheaper (even free sometimes), much more portable, and the reading experience is about the same as reading a paper book.

[imron]

e-books are cheaper (even free sometimes), much more portable,

... and full of 错别字

[Kenny同志]

No, I don't think so. In fact, many e-books I use are scanned copies of paper books.

[imron]

Yes, and the OCR scanning occasionally introduces 错别字.