Ask which shopping agent is cheapest and you will be given a service fee percentage. It is the wrong number to shop on, for reasons of arithmetic rather than opinion: on most real hauls the service fee is not the largest line on the invoice, and often not the second largest either.
This page takes the invoice apart. It contains no percentages, no rate tables and no figures for any specific agent — those change without announcement, we have not audited them, and a stale rate quoted with confidence is how bad information survives in this hobby for years. The structure is what does not change, and it is what lets you read whatever numbers you are shown.
The five places money leaves you
They arrive at different moments, which is most of why the total feels like a surprise.
- The goods. What the Chinese seller charges. Set by the seller, identical whichever agent you use.
- The domestic leg. Seller to the agent's warehouse, inside China. Normally small, normally quoted with the item, never optional.
- The agent's cut. A commission on the order, a flat handling charge, or a free-service headline. This is the number agents advertise against each other.
- International freight. Quoted only once your parcel is packed and weighed, on a line you pick.
- Everything optional. Extra QC photographs, repacking, discarding shoe boxes, insurance and declared-value choices, and storage past the free window.
You pay these across two separate transactions, weeks or months apart. That split, and what each payment buys you in terms of recourse, is its own guide.
A percentage is meaningless without its base
The first thing to establish about any advertised service fee is what it is charged on. The percentage is half a sentence.
Charged on the item price alone, on the item plus its domestic shipping, on the order total, before or after a promotional discount — these are different quantities, and two agents quoting the same figure against different bases are not quoting the same price. Read the fee page for the base, not the number. If the base is not stated plainly, that is itself information about how the page was written.
Minimums and caps matter the same way. A percentage with a floor under it behaves like a flat charge on cheap items, which bites hard if your haul is six small things rather than one expensive one.
"Free service" is a claim about one line, not about the total
An agent that charges nothing to buy on your behalf is not working for nothing. The margin is somewhere, and the honest question is where.
The candidates are all ordinary: a markup on the freight rate they buy wholesale from a forwarder, the spread on converting your currency, a surcharge on some payment methods, paid add-ons bundled elsewhere, or a membership tier that unlocks the good rate. None of that is sinister — it is how a zero on one line gets funded.
The useful consequence is narrow: you cannot compare two agents by comparing the lines they choose to advertise. A free-service agent with a worse freight rate is more expensive on almost any real parcel, for the reason in the next section.
The line that usually decides it
International freight is the number most likely to be the biggest on your invoice, and it is the one no guide can give you, because it does not exist until your box is packed.
Three mechanics govern it, and they are worth understanding once:
Chargeable weight is the greater of actual and volumetric weight. Volumetric weight is computed from the parcel's dimensions divided by a factor the carrier sets. A big light box therefore prices like a heavy one. This is the entire reason agents sell shoe-box removal and repacking as paid services — you are buying a smaller number to be charged on.
Lines price a first band, then increments. Most freight lines charge for an opening weight and then per unit above it. The consequence people miss is that the opening band is largely sunk once you ship at all, which is why sending one item is the most expensive way to do this and why consolidating a haul saves more money than switching agents ever will.
The line list is inherited, not invented. An agent is not a freight company; the menu you pick from is largely their forwarders' menu, which is why a same-sounding line behaves differently between agents and why availability moves with season, route and customs pressure. Shipping lines explained covers the families.
The two charges that never appear as a percentage
Storage. Free for an opening window, then per day, with the clock running per item from the moment each one is checked into the warehouse — not from your order, and not from when the haul was complete. A haul held for one missing item is a set of staggered deadlines, and the item you are waiting on is the one not accruing anything. Warehouse storage fees is the full version.
Currency and payment handling. Whatever sits between your card and a Chinese marketplace has a cost, and it is rarely a line item. It shows up as the exchange rate you got, or a surcharge on a particular method. Compare the amount that left your account, not the amount displayed at checkout.
A third is not the agent's at all: import duty and handling charges on arrival. Those are yours, thresholds differ by country and change, and you should read your own national customs authority's current page rather than a forum post or this one. Nobody here can give you tax advice about your parcel.
One more thing that is not a fee but behaves like one: when an item is out of stock or a line is cancelled, the money usually returns as a balance with the agent rather than to your card. A balance is capital in someone else's database that you can only spend with them, which quietly raises the cost of ever leaving. Top up roughly what you are about to spend rather than parking a float.
The only comparison worth running
A matched basket. The same items, the same packed weight, to the same destination, priced in the same week, all-in — goods, domestic leg, service fee, freight, add-ons, and what actually left your bank.
Nobody here has run it. This site has never put one basket through all eight agents and kept the invoices, which is why no agent page here prints percentages and none names a winner. That includes the head-to-heads: Superbuy vs SugarGoo, ACBuy vs MuleBuy, LoveGoBuy vs JoyaGoo and MuleBuy vs SugarGoo each compare what is checkable and stop.
You can run a version of it yourself in an afternoon. Take one item you genuinely intend to buy — from the shelf, or from a seller with quoted evidence behind them on the seller pages — paste it into the link decoder, open the results side by side, and take each as far as a shipping estimate at a realistic weight to your own address. That last step is where agents actually diverge.
This site earns a commission when somebody opens an agent account through one of its links. It never changes your price, it is set out on the methodology page, and it is the reason to distrust any fee comparison — ours included — that arrives at a single name. If you have not placed a first order, how to buy reps walks the chain in the order it happens.