Rep threads are dense with abbreviations, and almost none of them are explained, because everyone answering learned them two years ago and forgot they were ever confusing. This page is the decoder ring, arranged in the order you actually collide with the words: first finding something, then buying it, then looking at photographs of it, then arguing about how good it is.
Finding the item
- Rep — replica. The whole category. Nobody here claims otherwise, and any phrasing that implies an item is authentic is marketing, not description.
- W2C — "where to cop", meaning where do I buy this. A request for a link, not a compliment. It has its own page because the answer is rarely simple.
- Sauce / source / link? — the same request in different clothes.
- Cop — buy.
- Yupoo — a Chinese photo host that sellers use as a shop window. It shows you the item; it is not where you pay.
- Album — one Yupoo folder, usually one product, sometimes with a buy link tucked beside the photos and often without one.
- Weidian, Taobao, 1688 — the marketplaces where the item is actually sold. Weidian is small-seller storefronts, Taobao is the enormous consumer market, 1688 is the wholesale side.
- Item id — the number inside a marketplace URL. It is the only durable part of a link, which is why the decoder can rebuild a dead one from the URL's shape alone.
- Spreadsheet — a community-maintained sheet of items, sellers and links. Useful, and every row is a snapshot of what one person believed on the day they typed it.
- Haul — a batch of items bought together, and the post someone writes about them afterwards.
- Fit pic — a photo of the thing being worn, which is what most W2C comments are attached to.
Buying it
- Agent / shopping agent — the proxy buyer who purchases in China on your behalf and forwards the parcel. The full job is here.
- Warehouse — the agent's storage, where your items wait between purchase and shipping.
- Consolidation — combining several items into one international parcel, which is where the shipping saving lives.
- Submit — telling the agent which warehouse items to pack into a parcel.
- Line — a particular shipping route and courier combination. Agents offer several; they differ in speed, weight limits and what they refuse to carry.
- Declaration — the value and description on the customs paperwork.
- Repack — stripping shoeboxes and dust bags before packing to cut volumetric weight.
- Service fee — the agent's cut for doing the buying. Read the agent's own fee page; the structures differ and forum numbers go stale.
- Seized — a parcel stopped by customs. Rules and thresholds change by country and change often, so check a current official source rather than a two-year-old thread.
Checking it
- QC — quality check: photographs of your specific unit, taken at the warehouse before shipping. What it is and what it is for.
- GL — green light. Approve the item into your parcel.
- RL — red light. Refuse it, and ask for a replacement or a refund.
- Tells — the specific details worth checking on a given model: heel shape, stitch density, sole colour, logo placement.
- Variance — the fact that two units from the same run are not identical. It is why a QC photo of your item matters and a review of somebody else's does not settle anything.
Judging it
- Batch — one factory's production run of one item. One factory, one set of moulds, one lot of materials.
- Batch code — the community nickname for such a run: LJR, PK, GX, M, VT. The codes are scoped to a silhouette, not to quality in general, which is why GP and PK cannot be compared in the abstract.
- Factory — the same idea for bags and watches, where names rather than letter codes do the work: 187, God Factory, SYmode, VSF, ZF.
- Tier — an informal ranking of runs within one model. "Top batch" means best available for that shoe, not best in the world.
- Rebrand — a seller relabelling a run to ride a better name. Documented cases in our own data include a weak run being sold as "GodKiller" and one strong run being resold under three different names by three sellers.
- Retail — the genuine article, used as the comparison object.
- 1:1 — a marketing phrase meaning "identical to retail". Treat it as advertising copy. It is applied by the seller, verified by nobody, and it appears on listings across the whole quality range.
- Flaw — a defect. Worth separating into unit flaws, which a replacement fixes, and run flaws, which are on every piece the factory made and which no exchange will remove.
Words that sound like promises
A handful of terms exist mainly to make you feel safe: legit, verified, trusted, authentic, guaranteed. None of them mean anything when applied to a replica by a person selling it, and this site refuses to apply them to anybody. What it publishes instead is what buyers actually wrote, dated and linked back to the thread it came from, on the seller index — plus a plain statement of what the record does not cover.
If a term you met is missing here, it is probably a seller's own invention, and that is worth knowing on its own. Start with how to buy reps if the vocabulary was the last thing standing between you and a first order.