#xianyu

okay so first of all, Xianyu is a Chinese secondhand shopping platform, kind of like Mercari, and it's an amazing place to find all kinds of pins and other fanmerch. It's part of Taobao, an even bigger shopping platform. I've heard that if you can actually make an account with Taobao/Xianyu, you can maybe buy through there directly without having to use a shopping agent. I don't know anything about this personally, and I don't think I would know enough to buy without a shopping agent even if I could get an account. (I had a Taobao account for about five minutes once and it got frozen because I set a password, and I can't really try again because it was based on my phone number.)

If you're luckier than me and you can get an account with Taobao or Xianyu, then...definitely do that, because it'll make your life easier. I can't tell you anything about how to do it because I couldn't do it, but you might find guides on r/Taobao. I actually don't even know if the same login works on both Taobao and Xianyu despite them being part of the same company. I have gathered that it's not possible to browse Taobao without account, whereas it is (generally) possible to do so on Xianyu. If you have a Xianyu account, however, you can favorite items to come back to them later and start conversations with sellers, which sounds convenient. Again, though, I couldn't get an account so I can't tell you how to do this. I can only tell you what I've done as a peasant who could not get an account.

What you want is goofish.com on a desktop browser. You can usually browse this site without an account. Sometimes the site will actually block you from browsing without an account, which may have something to do with overloaded servers--originally I was able to search and browse using Firefox, but at some point that stopped working and now I have to use Chrome for searching/browsing but I can still view individual pages in Firefox. As long as you're getting a pop-up you can dismiss, though, you're good. If you're being completely blocked, just try again later in the hopes that it's an issue of an overloaded server or something, and not a change to the site requiring an account just to browse (I live in fear of this tbh 😬). The important thing is that for the most part, you can browse the site this way and copy listing URLs into a shopping agent website, and then the shopping agent can buy the items for you, store them at their warehouse, and ship a big package of purchased items to your home.

You will also want to download the Xianyu app. You can browse with this but you can't copy the listing URLs without an account; however, you still need it because some listings contain info on the app that isn't shown on the site.

Finally, you need some kind of translation plugin for your browser. I have Simple Translate on Firefox and I guess Google Translate for Chrome. In a lot of ways the one I found for Chrome is better because it translates everything on the page, instead of waiting for me to select individual bits of text. With my Chrome plugin, for instance, part of a results page looks like this, compared to on Firefox where it's all in Chinese:

That's also how I set up search results when I've looked through everything on a given result and I'm just coming back to check for new stuff. By default I think it's on "new price reduction," so I pick "up to date" to sort by date and see the most recently added items.

As you might guess though, a lot of the descriptions will still be very confusing even with a translation plugin! Probably the only way they would fully make sense would be if you could actually read Chinese. Translation plugins are a lot better than nothing, but they're far from perfect, just because English and Chinese are so different. Just from browsing a lot of listings and buying several of them, though, I've picked up a few things that are good to know:

[出] usually gets translated to "out" but it seems to really mean something more like "for sale" or "available"

[收] in the title is translated as "collect" and means it's an ISO post, NOT something for sale (although there's nothing stopping you from using the photos for your own ISO purposes). Another major hint that something is an ISO post rather than a sale post is the use of pin artwork rather than photos.

[展示] can translate to "display" or "exhibit", or the post might begin with something like [展示不出]. These are purely display posts, also not for sale. They will break your heart. (however, if the description says something like "they can be squatted," I think that basically means logged-in users can claim items they'd like to buy if/when OP ends up deciding to sell them at some point…so if a display post has something you desperately want, at the very least it doesn't hurt to bookmark it and check the user's profile later to see if any of those pins are being sold separately)

[无] sometimes translates as "not out" or "none" which seems to mean "sold out"

if a listing says a particular thing has been "released" or is "already out", that probably also means it's been sold

another important thing is search terms. I've found that using a combination of English and Chinese to search Xianyu seems to work pretty well--primarily Chinese, but some sellers do use occasional English terms in their listings, so it doesn't hurt to search for those too. for instance, because I'm primarily looking for Loki pins, these are my regular searches:

漫威 徽章 (Marvel badge)

Marvel 徽章 (Marvel badge)

洛基 徽章 (Loki badge, although it usually translates back to "Rocky badge" and yes, wrestling items do come up sometimes)

Loki 徽章 (Loki badge)

漫威 洛基 (Marvel Loki)

I'm not sure how much it matters if you have spaces between words or not, although on the listings they seem to have words run together, so it might not matter.

generally if I want to look for something outside of my usual search terms, I'll try a search in English and that will usually get me at least a couple results that help me figure out what the relevant terms are in Chinese, which I then use for subsequent (and much more successful) searches. obviously I don't have a Chinese keyboard, so I just copy the terms I want into a note for later.

in my case I also do the general "Marvel badge" searches because people often don't tag specific characters if they're selling a ton of miscellaneous pins, especially if they're selling pins from multiple fandoms, so if you're trying to find a specific character, you will probably also want to look through the results for the whole fandom. this will take a while the first time and there's just no getting around it.

to look up a listing in the Xianyu app, you'll need to download it first, and then you used to be able to get the item's QR code right from the listing page so you could go to it directly with your phone, but for some reason they took away that feature, BUT now you can visit entire user pages from Goofish when you couldn't before, so…win some lose some I guess? the best (maybe only at this point) way to get the QR code is to copy the item link from Goofish. go to Superbuy. right on the home page, where it says "Please enter the product link or keyword"? paste the link there and hit enter. the resulting listing is how you would actually buy something with Superbuy, but it's also useful because under the title it includes a direct "items link>" to the item's page on Taobao and that has a functional QR code that can take your phone straight to the item in the Xianyu app.

EDIT: as of 8/5/25, this method doesn't work anymore because Superbuy stopped generating the Taobao link for some reason. However, you can still get to it if you manually replace all the Goofish stuff in your link with all the relevant Taobao stuff. Basically you just need the item ID from the Goofish URL, and then you put it at the end of this (without the angle brackets):

< https://market.m.taobao.com/app/idleFish-F2e/fish-pc/web/detail.html?id= >

according to my plugin, this listing says "The price is on the picture," but there are no prices on the picture, so I would have to check the app. and on the app, magically, it looks like this:

this photo also shows one that's sold out, bottom right:

It’s obvious here because it’s blurred out, but sellers don’t always do that—they might just use that [无] or something similar, which my phone is translating as “not out” but I think I’ve also seen it translate as “none”

this listing also has a bit about bundles. this is a thing you will probably run into, where people are like "if you want any of these pins, you have to buy an equal amount of these other pins that I really want to get rid of," and it's kind of a nightmare to deal with through a shopping agent. at least this person is saying it upfront though. I had problems with a seller who sprang the bundle thing on me by surprise and then kept trying to get me to buy more pins I didn't want and it was a whole thing, I finally just gave up and got a refund

my iPhone can translate text on images, which is something else you might need to do, either in taking screenshots from the Xianyu app, or if somebody sends you a screenshot with Chinese text; basically I just open the photo and select the actual text, and there's a "translate" option. it doesn't always work.

now for Superbuy itself. Superbuy is one of several shopping agents, but it's the only one I've used thus far, so it's the only one with which I have personal experience. my guess is that things would work more or less the same way with other shipping agents, but again, I couldn't tell you that for sure because I haven't tried any other ones. I primarily relied on this guide to compare the sites for me and chose Superbuy because it sounded like the best option of the ones listed (actually I think Pandabuy sounded even better, but it had been shut down shortly before I started trying to use a shopping agent in the first place). I think ParcelUp is another one that's not mentioned in that guide; I haven't personally used it either.

I'm not going to go over the absolute basics of Superbuy use because most of that is pretty well covered by various guides on the Superbuy Reddit and on Superbuy's novice guide. Method 1 on Superbuy's tutorial here is a pretty good rundown of how things work. (2nd Hand E-Comm includes Xianyu, but there aren't that many differences here between that and other e-commerce platforms.)

Something they don't really tell you, though, is what to do with a multi-item listing that has an outrageous price you're not expected to pay. I was initially worried about these but they're not a big deal.

To use this listing as an example: The listed price is ¥4580. That's like $625 USD!! possibly more depending on how it's being converted!! it's possible that's a reasonable price for the entire pin lot, but you don't want to buy the whole lot and the seller almost certainly isn't expecting anyone to buy the whole lot either. If you could use Xianyu directly, you could just message them to ask how much an individual pin costs and arrange to buy it directly, but to do it through a shopping agent, there's a bit of an extra step, since you don't want to pay $625 up front even if you would probably get most of it refunded. (lol actually it turns out what would happen is this seller would refuse to sell to an international/proxy buyer, as some of them do, and you would be sad. but it's still a good example for this specific thing.)

after you paste the link into Superbuy and it captures all the information, you'll get the option to edit the price:

If the listing included individual prices, you can enter the actual price here with a note saying so and whatever option makes the most sense. If not, I usually just enter something like this:

click Confirm, then Buy Now. On the next screen you can reiterate that you only want to buy a certain number of items from the multi-item listing

this way, when you buy it, you're paying a much smaller amount than the item actually costs, and the shopping agent will have to contact you to ask which item(s) you want. you then send them a screenshot with your desired item(s) circled.

they'll get back to you with the additional amount you have to pay to actually buy the thing you want…or in some cases to tell you it's sold out or that there are other complications, but ideally that doesn't happen. once the shopping agent buys it, the item shows up on your Orders page as "purchased," and then "shipped (local)" after the seller ships it, and eventually it gets stored in the Superbuy warehouse with photos so you can actually see it and make sure there aren't any problems (usually there aren't).

another important thing though: when you get a "confirmation pending" notice, always reply even if it doesn't sound like you need to do anything, because leaving a confirmation open for 72 hours will automatically cancel the transaction. Also, when you upload a screenshot this way, you can only upload one image, it has to be smaller than 2MB, and you won't be able to see it after the fact, so it's a good idea to keep records of some kind. If you want to send screenshots for a listing with multiple pages, you have a couple options: you can use something like PicCollage to put everything you want into a single image, or you can start a message thread with the shopping agent.

If you do the latter, you do still need to put something in the confirmation field, like "I am sending two screenshots through the contact form". doing it as a message also has a limit of 2MB per image, it just allows you to upload more than one image and to see what you've uploaded.

The agent will sometimes reply to you with the "confirmation pending" thing anyway, which is annoying, but I usually reply back in the message thread and then just write something like "replied in messages" in the confirmation box so the transaction doesn't get auto-canceled. (yes, this is something I've learned the hard way.)

once the item is in the Superbuy warehouse, it's stored for free for I think 90 days. this was another reason I chose Superbuy; they had a longer free storage period than most other shopping agents I checked, and I wanted to be able to consolidate a bunch of items into one package. that part, getting all my stuff shipped internationally to myself, is kind of complicated and I have less advice there because I've dealt with that aspect less.

one thing I can say, though, is that it's good to check your Warehouse tab to see if there are any restrictions listed next to any of your items. these can limit the shipping lines you're able to use, which can cost you more money, so it's worth checking to see if you can get the restrictions removed. an obvious one is "Sensitive product Famous Branded Items/CD/DVD" which in my case usually means a thing says MARVEL on it. if it's just on the tag, I can choose Product Label Removal in Other Services, which costs like thirty extra cents, and the warehouse will cut off the tag, which removes the restriction (I usually include a note like "please cut off the tag if doing so will remove the restriction" but I don't know if that makes a difference). I think you can also use this to have an item removed from its box, if the box has a brand name on it. of course, if the brand name is on the item itself, you're out of luck. I've been told it's best to ship brand-name items with non-brand-name items because that makes it more likely they'll get through inspection. liquid/paste is another restriction, which will show up if you're getting a pin or charm with liquid glitter inside; you're also out of luck on that one. I had a seller include a little tube of glue once that I didn't expect, though, and I used Split Order/Discard Item in Other Services to have the warehouse remove the tube of glue from the order, which removed the restriction.

the biggest problem right now with international shipping is of course the fucking tariffs. there are some tax-free/duty-free lines that are probably your best bet at the moment, and frankly you should consider yourself lucky if you can use them, because I'm in Alaska and I can't. (if you're not in the US at all, consider yourself very lucky on this particular issue.)

so far, I've always submitted my packages myself instead of using the Shipping Expert service. I've been told Shipping Expert can save money over the amount you pay for it, but I'm not totally sure how that works, and in my case it was a waste of time because the supposed expert picked a shipping line that couldn't go to Alaska, which like...was exactly what I was hoping to avoid. if you do it yourself, make absolutely sure the address is correct before you submit (guess what else I learned the hard way). some shipping lines have insurance options that aren't too expensive, and if you get insurance, it should be for the actual value of the items. you also have to declare a value of the package, which in theory is not the actual value of the items; I've been told that about $15 USD per kg is ideal for the declared value but I don't actually know what that's based on and I don't know what the consequences are if a package gets seized. I don't think it's common for packages to get seized, either, but apparently it does happen on occasion. sometimes your package can be returned by Chinese customs, and in that case you'll get back what you paid for shipping and you can try again (but you probably want to contact customer service to ask what the problem was so you don't repeat it). if your package gets all the way to the destination country and gets kicked back for some reason, though, like an incorrect address, you're out whatever you paid for shipping.