What it is
The EastMallBuy Spreadsheet is a shopfront you can walk through without signing in
The EastMallBuy Spreadsheet is the collection of product cards you look through before you order anything. Each card carries a picture, a name, a mark saying which Chinese marketplace it sits on, and a link. Ours is grouped by category, and it opens to anybody.
The name is a leftover. Years ago people really did swap finds in shared files, and the word stuck to the thing that replaced them. What it describes now is a browsable catalogue of goods, closer to a shop window than to any kind of document.
Being precise about this is worth a paragraph, because the two halves get confused constantly and the confusion costs people time and money. The catalogue never touches your payment. The agent never decides what goes in the catalogue.
One card, four pieces of information
A card is not a specification. It tells you what the thing looks like, what to call it, where it lives and how to reach it. Three of those four are for you. The fourth is the only part EastMallBuy needs.
The picture is the seller photograph, so treat it the way you would treat any product shot. Reliable for shape, silhouette and print placement. Unreliable for colour, and colour difference is one of the three things the inspection policy names as excluded, which makes it your problem twice over.
The mark tells you which marketplace the seller is on. That matters for search language, for how much the seller bothers to write, and for whether a signed out visitor can see the item on the agent site at all.
Two jobs, two companies
Which side does what
If something goes wrong, this is the table that tells you which inbox to write to. It is also the reason this guide can be blunt about the agent: we are not the agent.
The catalogue side
- Shows product cards by category, with a picture and a link on each
- Opens without an account, so you can shortlist before committing to anything
- Never takes a payment, never holds stock, never sees your address
- Cannot promise an item is in stock, because stock lives with the seller
- Is where the browsing has to happen, given the sign in wall on the agent search
The agent side, EastMallBuy
- Buys the item from the seller with your money
- Runs the appearance inspection and takes the QC photos
- Stores the goods, packs the parcel, picks the line and files the customs declaration
- Decides what it will and will not accept, through its prohibited goods list and its anti-counterfeiting policy
- Is the only side that can refund you, because it is the side holding the money
Where the goods come from
Four marketplaces, three marks and an image search
The EastMallBuy search box carries three source marks: Taobao, 1688 and Weidian, plus a button for searching by image. The site title goes further and names Tmall and JD as well, which is ordinary enough, since Tmall listings sit inside Taobao search.
The practical difference between them is who you are buying from. Taobao and Tmall are retail. 1688 is wholesale, which means lower unit prices, minimum quantities and sellers who assume you know what you are ordering. Weidian is smaller and more informal, and a lot of community finds sit there.
Signed out, only the Taobao route renders at all, and it renders empty. The other two redirect to the login page. Worth knowing before you spend an evening trying to make the search work.
What using the catalogue saves you
Four concrete savings. None of them is about price: the catalogue does not change what the seller charges.
You browse in your own language
Seller titles are written in Chinese for a Chinese audience. On the cards the naming is in English, which is the difference between browsing and translating.
The link is already the right one
A card links to the item, not to a shop front or a search result. Handing over a link that points somewhere near the item instead of at it is the most common ordering mistake there is.
Categories that match how you shop
Sixty four categories, from hoodies to travel bags, each one a page you can scroll. The category list
No account needed to look
Given that the agent search box needs a login, this is the only place the looking can happen. Open the catalogue
What it does not do
Four honest limits. Two of them catch people out regularly.
A card is not a promise that the item exists
Stock sits with the seller on the marketplace and moves without telling anybody. A card can be perfectly current and the size you want can still be gone. Check on the listing page before you build a plan around it.
Nothing on a card is a quality verdict
Cards are not ranked, scored or reviewed here, and this guide runs no scoring system either. What we publish instead is what the official policies cover, so you can decide with the same information the warehouse will be working from.
Prices move, and they are set elsewhere
Seller prices change daily, and freight depends on weight, volume, line and destination. This guide publishes no amounts at all. The agent estimate page is where the current numbers live. How the cost is put together
Measurements come from the seller, if at all
Sizing is the single most common reason a find disappoints, and size measurement error is named in the inspection policy as excluded. Ask for flat measurements in centimetres before ordering. The coverage check
Why use the Spreadsheet when you could search the marketplaces yourself
You could search the marketplaces directly. Plenty of people do, and if you read Chinese it is a perfectly good way to shop. The catalogue earns its place in three narrow ways.
It gets you to a specific item rather than a category of items, which is the step where most orders go wrong. It works without an account at a point in the process where the agent site does not. And it puts several marketplaces next to each other, so you can see that the same thing exists at retail and at wholesale before deciding which one you actually want.
What it cannot do is tell you whether the item is worth having. That is the judging page, and it starts from what the inspection will and will not confirm.
What a finds list owes you before any money moves
What makes a useful finds list is not taste, it is completeness. Every entry is asking you to start spending, so every entry owes you three inputs, and each missing input maps to a mistake with a price on it.
A photo that answers the three unchecked things
The inspection covers appearance of model, style and size, and its own REMINDER, read 4 August 2026, puts colour difference, size measurement error and the result of actual use outside the service. The photo on the entry is the only tool you get for exactly those three. If it is too small or too styled to answer them, the risk it was supposed to retire stays on you.
A link that resolves inside the buying scope
The agent states its own scope in the site title: Taobao, Tmall, Jingdong, 1688 agent purchase. An entry whose link points anywhere else fails after your reading time is already spent, which makes it the cheapest mistake on this page and the most common. Checking the marketplace name in the link costs seconds and is the only check that is free.
A date that says whether evidence could exist yet
QC photos appear on a product page only after somebody has already bought that item through the agent, and not every listing has them. The date on an entry tells you how to read their absence: on a fresh find, no QC photos is normal; on an entry that has been circulating for months, it is information about demand.