Yoybuy Review #1

kk So my friends and I decided to make a huge taobao order about a few weeks ago, and after making a list of what we all wanted, one of my friends (Stanley) went to go with Taobaospree since that shopping service seemed to have a lot of great reviews.
First off, I have to say that ordering from Taobaospree was kind of stressful, especially to Stanley who was directly contacting one of their agents and I was just being told what was going on. We had to do a spreadsheet that kept messing with our heads, and who knows how long it took us to finally finish filling out the spreadsheet. At first we tried to order during the week when all the Taobao agents were on vacation due to the Moon Festival holiday. We attempted again on October 9. I wanted to order a cosplay and I had Stanley ask our agent how long it would take for it to get done. Our agent tells her that the dress is in stock and ready to ship to U.S. in 3-5 days. We were surprised since we assumed all cosplays were made to order and Stanley hoped the agent didn't misunderstand the question...
Commission fee from Taobaospree was $18 and insurance was an extra $8 in case something tragic happened to our package.
Stanley gets confused and tells me that at the bottom of the spreadsheet, it said that a Paypal fee has to be charged for "checking," and at the top it says without insurance Paypal, Paypal etc. extra fee 4% + 0.3 USD.  Which is weird because we were told we weren't going to get charged PP fees. =___= I was like whatever, I'm ready to pay.
Stanley then tells me that our agent wanted me to send the total amount to her PP (our total was over $200, keep in mind). I was like WHAT. 'Cause sending money to someone's PP shouldn't require a charge for PP fees, and I'm very wary of sending any cash over $50 as a gift to anyone's PP because obviously if anything happens, PP can't get your money back.
I also didn't like how every time Stanley tried to ask a certain question about the cosplay I wanted to order, the agent wouldn't respond. I'm not sure if it's because the agent's English wasn't great or not but the agent wouldn't respond to some of our questions. My friend had asked about the cosplay several times and no answer. That in itself is already suspicious and shady.
So my friend tried out her Yoybuy account since she's ordered from them and it had not been a nightmare. Yoybuy agents were offline except the ones that were dealing with parcels, so she decides to open a Pruany account just to try it out. Aaaand when she tried to add some items into the shopping cart, Pruany says that some of the items are undefined LOL. She talks to an agent (Yoybuy?) who tells her that the cosplay would MAYBE take 15 days to complete, and shop hours are 6 hours a day and possibly not including the weekends.
Suspicous of the Taobaospree agent now? Of course we decided to stick with the agent that tells us the dress would take 15 days to make and we immediately stopped communication with Taobaospree and go with Yoybuy (we didn't get the dress because we don't think it will get here on time for a convention we're planning to go to, and we're just gonna make the cosplay ourselves).
We used Stanley's account on Yoybuy since she used their shopping service before and had no problem using them. She already had all our stuff added to the shopping cart, and all I had to do was add money into the account and pay for all of it. So I paid, got a message saying that the order will be processed in 24 hours, and the next day on October 10 Stanley tells me that our Yoybuy agent has already bought all our stuff except for the mask because the seller of that item wasn't online, then later because the seller has to ship the mask in a box so it wouldn't break during shipping, so had to add a couple more dollars but I didn't mind doing that.
After everything was bought, we just had to wait for everything to get to the warehouse. One item arrived at the warehouse on the 12th, and later the same day, three of our wigs arrived. The next day, one wig and four other small items arrived. On 14th everything had arrived except for the mask, which arrived the next day on the 15th. Our Yoybuy agent kept up with all these updates to Stanley for every day this happened. On the 16th, Stanley was told that after everything was wrapped up and packaged, the weight increased and we had to give them $6. I had to wait until I got home from school to pay the extra $6. Later that day after paying though, our stuff got shipped!! We were hoping to get our package by the 20th, but it ended up coming today (22nd), but I'm glad we have all that we wanted today!!



Yoybuy is definitely much more organized and easier to navigate. All you have to do is add the links of the items you want in their shopping cart, and it automatically calculates USD and domestic shipping for you. Domestic shipping from Yoybuy is $1.92 for every store you order from, so if you order say 3 wigs from the same store, domestic shipping total for all three items is $1.92. :D

Just to let anyone that's interested ordering from Yoybuy know, you can get points every time you order from them, get upgraded to VIP and the commission fee will be only 8%. That's a pretty good deal for us since we plan to make more Taobao orders in the future and we're definitely sticking with Yoybuy.

If you want pics, let me know and I'll upload them later if I can find them. I have to find them first since the photo proofs were in a different laptop and that was destroyed, so...yeah. My friends and I are definitely gonna make another Taobao order in the future with Yoybuy, and we'll definitely make another review for that order along with pics. :D

Yaoi Con 2012

This photo pretty much describes my whole Saturday at Yaoi Con lololol
Photo Credit: Misled Youth http://www.facebook.com/MisledYouthPhoto

No worries, there are still some more photos! Credits to Misled Youth, SNTP, and my friend Sarah Grepo. :D I also apologize that although it was Yaoi Con, I obviously couldn't yaoi with anyone. Not when there were bewbs everywhere. *^* lolololol