Almost every budget that goes wrong goes wrong the same way: someone adds up the item prices, decides the haul costs that, and then meets the shipping quote. The item price is real, it is just the smallest of five numbers, and it is the only one you can see before you commit.
This page names the five and says plainly which of them we can put a figure on. The answer is none of them, and the reason is worth more to you than an invented number would be.
The five numbers
- The items. What the seller charges, in yuan. This is the number posted on Reddit next to a photo, and the only one anybody ever quotes.
- Domestic shipping inside China. Seller to the agent's warehouse. Small per item, invisible until you read the line items, and paid once per seller rather than once per haul — which is a quiet argument for buying several things from one store.
- The agent's own cut. Some agents take a percentage of the item, some advertise a free service and make their margin somewhere else, and the model changes when the agent decides it should. Read it on their own page on the day you order.
- International shipping. Quoted per parcel by chargeable weight and volume, with a choice of lines that run roughly express, standard and economy in order of speed and price. On most hauls this is the largest number after the goods themselves.
- What happens at your border. Import duty, import VAT or sales tax, and often a courier or postal handling fee for collecting them. Thresholds and rates differ by country and they move. Check your own customs authority's current page — not a rep forum, and not this one.
The number nobody looks up is weight
Everything about international shipping is priced on a number the product page rarely shows. A puffer jacket and a pair of jeans can cost the same and ship for very different money, and a shoebox is mostly air that you pay to move.
A few sellers publish the figure. In a 2019 thread about an oversized sweatshirt, a buyer's whole report was two facts, one about fit and one about mass:
I got a size XXS and it's still oversized but the fit is great! Weight was 650g
u/maerkeligt, r/FashionReps, 27 September 2019
That is a rare thing to find in a comment and a rarer thing to find in an album. Sellers who publish weight alongside worn photos and video are the minority, and it is one of the few concrete reasons to prefer one store's listings over another's — the platform guide goes into what a usable album actually contains.
If the seller posts a weight, write it down while you are shopping. If they do not, assume outerwear and shoes are heavy and budget for it.
Two levers move the shipping number and both are yours: ship one parcel rather than several, because pricing is by weight and volume with a floor, and ask your agent to remove shoe boxes if you do not want them. That second one trades a collector's box for real volume.
Why there is no rate card on this page
We have not measured any agent's fees, and the ones we could copy today are the agent's to change tomorrow. A stale percentage stated confidently is worse than no percentage, because it reads as research.
There is a second reason, and it is less comfortable. This site earns a commission when someone opens an agent account through its links, which makes us exactly the wrong people to publish a fee comparison that happens to flatter the agents we are paid by. The ranking method exists to keep money out of the ordering on the seller side; the same rule applies here. The KakoBuy review says the same thing at more length and still gives no numbers.
Treat the quote your agent gives you on your actual packed parcel as the price. It is the only figure in this whole process that is real.
A practical way to hold the budget
Decide the total you are willing to spend before you shop, not after. Then spend well under it on items, because the remaining costs arrive later and are not optional — the parcel is already in China when you find out what it weighs.
Set the items aside in the warehouse and let the haul build, rather than shipping each thing as it lands. The beginner guide covers the mechanics of that; the reason is arithmetic. One five-item parcel beats five one-item parcels, every time.
Keep the original product links too. Agent links rot, and the link decoder will rebuild a working one from the item id in a dead URL — which matters when you are re-costing a haul weeks after you found the pieces.
What this page cannot tell you
Nobody here has bought a haul, timed a parcel on any line, or paid duty in any country. We hold no receipts, no invoices and no shipping quotes, so nothing above is a measurement.
What we do hold is a corpus of 237 Reddit comments about sellers, and searched for anything resembling a cost breakdown it returns almost nothing — the one quoted above, about a single sweatshirt in 2019, is a fair sample of the best of it. A buyer reporting a garment's weight in passing is the closest thing to a shipping input anyone in that record wrote down. Anyone telling you a rep haul "usually" costs a specific figure is describing their own haul and calling it a rule.
Start small, on something you would not mind losing, and learn what the numbers do on your route before you build the expensive version.