Because the flathead earbud market is so niche, there aren’t many places to buy them. Aside from a few dozen boutique makers, most purchases are made through Chinese platforms—usually AliExpress. The same applies to DIY parts: earphone builders typically source components from AliExpress or Alibaba. However, due to political factors, these marketplaces have increasingly become a geo-blocking lottery, with fewer and fewer items available to customers in the US and EU.
Fortunately, there are other options. With the help of a third-party service, you can shop from Chinese domestic marketplaces intended for local buyers—such as Taobao, 1688, Weidian, Vip.com, or Xianyu. Not only can you find items there that never appear on AliExpress, but prices are often significantly lower—sometimes two or even three times cheaper. This is especially true for DIY supplies like drivers, shells, and cables.
The most popular Chinese marketplace is Taobao. I personally discovered Taobao when I was determined to buy the legendary Longyao Yinman 600Ω 2.0 earbuds, which weren’t available on AliExpress. That search led me to Superbuy—a so-called shopping agent that helps international customers purchase from Taobao and other Chinese marketplaces. My first experience with Superbuy was smooth, and two or three weeks later I was happily listening to my Yinmans. Since then, I’ve picked up a few tips that can make shopping on Taobao much easier. I am happy to share them with you.
How does SuperBuy work?
Superbuy works much like a regular online store. It integrates listings from Taobao and other Chinese marketplaces, so you simply search for items, add them to your cart, and pay for the products plus domestic shipping to Superbuy’s warehouse in China. Once your items arrive there, you have a 90 day free storage until you decide you are done with shopping and it‘s time to arrange international shipping. Orders from multiple Chinese shops can be consolidated into a single package and sent to you anywhere in the world—Europe, USA, Australia, and beyond. And here‘s the best part – Superbuy does not charge fees for its basic services. Looks like they earn from international shipping.
Shopping on Taobao through Superbuy Step-by-Step
1. Create an account on SuperBuy
Register and fill in your contact details and shipping address. New users are usually gifted coupons that can later be used to reduce the price of international shipping.
2. Choose what you want to buy
There are a few different ways to do that but actually, this can be very tricky. Despite SuperBuy supporting English language, the search function works poorly as it relies on translation, which is not perfect.
So the best way would be having the direct link to the item you want on Taobao (or other supported marketplace) and pasting it into Superbuy’s search bar:
But finding the item on Taobao marketplace is also difficult for the same reasons – you need to search in Chinese for it to work properly. And, of course, you also need to be able to browse the Taobao website, which can be a nightmare.
Luckily, both Superbuy and Taobao websites have image search implemented, so you can upload the product photo from AliExpress listing and hope it recognizes it well.
Let’s try and see how it goes with the actual product – the QIGOM S68A 15.4mm 68Ohm dynamic speaker driver with graphene membrane. A pair costs around USD20 on AliExpress. I used the same photo of the driver on SuperBuy’s search and it worked very well this time:
SuperBuy found the same image listed in one of it’s product listing from 1688,com marketplace. As we see, the price of the driver is listed US $ 7.83 which is actually for one piece, not pair (that’s common on 1688, Taobao, Tmall, etc.). Not that much cheaper compared to AliExpress, right? But if we go to the listing, we’ll see, that buying 10 pieces results in a massive discount – US $ 4.7/piece which is two times cheaper than buying on AliExpress.
Unluckily, the image search does not work perfectly all the time – for example, earbuds get recognised as shower heads….. So what I do then is I search for Taobao items on Google (usually by image search) and then just copy&paste the link to the SuperBuy:
Please, note: you can’t paste just any Taobao link to SuperBuy’s search bar – the beginning of proper Taobao product link looks like this: https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=100xxxxxxxxx
To walk you through the next steps, I will be actually ordering the Sullect Audio H2O earphones, which are only available on Taobao marketplace at the moment: https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=1006610002673
To order these earbuds, we need to paste this URL of the Taobao listing into the search button on SuperBuy to load the product page, as I mentioned in the previous step:
3. Add your items to the shopping cart
Once you find the products which interest you, you can add them to the shopping cart just like in any other regular online shop – specify the required quantity and click the “Add to Cart” button. In my case, I only added 1 pair of earphones.
4. Place and pay the order
When your shopping cart contains everything you would like to buy, hit the “Submit” button which then will lead you to the order confirmation page:
The Order confirmation page lets you choose some extra “value-added Services” which in most cases are not necessary, especially the packaging options, which you will be able to choose later when you order the international shipping. The only thing I would recommend choosis is the “Experience Small Amount Advance Payments Service” option visible above the “submit” button. This authorises SuperBuy to charge you small extra fees if needed to cover some price mismatches (sometimes they happen due to fluctuations in product prices or domestic shipping fees) without first informing you and then waiting for your manual payment.
Once you submit the order confirmation, you’ll be transferred to the payment page where you will be able to choose the preferred payment method including payment from the balance which means you have to top up the balance in advance and then you can use it for your orders as long as your balance is enough to cover the fees. Actually, this is my preferred payment method, because it saves a lot of time, especially when shopping often.
Anyways, there are many different ways you can pay for your SuperBuy orders or top-up your balance. Some are instant and some have to be confirmed by SuperBuy’s staff manually. Also, you’ll see that some are a little bit more expensive than the others.
After the payment you’ll see the Payment confirmation window:
5. Wait for the products reach the warehouse of SuperBuy
After the successful payment of the order, the rest is handled by the SuperBuy’s staff. One of the agents will purchase the products that you chose, which then will be shipped to the warehouse of Superbuy. Once the products reach the warehouse, the staff checks them, weighs and takes 3 photos for you to see. As soon as this happens, you will receive email and also an internal message similar to this:
The message contains the link to your storage, where you can see all the items which are ready to be shipped to you. In this particular case, I only had one order delivered to SuperBuy’s warehouse:
As you see, there are 3 thumbnail photos of the actual items received by the warehouse. Clicking on them opens larger photos. In case you notice something unexpected, you could contact the support. In my case, the photos did not show anything wrong but there was a remark “Appliances” show in red under “Mail Restrictions” section – I circled it in yellow for you to see. Placing the mouse pointer over the question mark, revealed the message “If the item has mailling restriction, the item would need to be shipped by the certain delivery methods”. That’s not good. We don’t want this as this limits the shipping methods, probably eliminating the cheapest ones. This may happen for battery-powered devices but there’s no reason for simple wired earphones, so I’ll try to contact the support to resolve this issue.
Contacting the support
to solve any order issues, you should go to the list of your orders by navigating the menu or simply going to https://www.superbuy.com/order to see the list of your orders. There you will see a 
Describe your problem and click the “submit” button”:
Once the agent replies, you’ll receive a message.
6. Submit the international delivery order
When you have at least one item in your warehouse, you have two options – either order some more products, either submit the delivery order right away by selecting the products in your warehouse and then clicking one of the buttons visible below: “Shipping Expert” or “Submit”.
Clicking on “Shipping Expert” would let you order an assisted shipping service, which costs extra but may result in cheaper international delivery. I’ve never used this; therefore, can’t comment whether it really pays off.
Also, before placing the delivery order, you can order some extra services by clicking on “Value-added service” button which opens the list of services to choose.
Clicking the “Submit” button brings you to the window where you will have to choose the preferred shipping company and packaging.
The listing includes the delivery prices, which in fact are not exact. SuperBuy treats this as an estimated deposit. The actual shipping price depends of the measurements of the packaging which is still not know at this stage. Once the warehouse worker packs your items, he/she weights and measures it, takes a photo and then you are either refunded part of the deposit or you have to pay some more. Both situations happened to me before.
As for the delivery method, I always choose the “Tax-Free” or “Duty-Free” ones. The system also asks to enter the value for customs declaration – I always declare the actual value because this is also the value that would be compensated in case of lost package. Lower value does not lower the total price for the “Tax-Free” shipping methods, has no impact on customs duties but it does for the others.
You also have the option to choose boxed or bagged packaging. Bags will take less space, therefore, shipping will cost less. But this is also more prone to shipping damages, so it totally depends on how sensitive your items are.
After you submit the delivery order, it will be packed and sent to Chinese customs for export. Sometimes the export fails, and the package returns to the warehouse of SuperBuy. In such case you get refunded for the international delivery and need to submit another delivery order, preferably by some other delivery company. This happened to me as well. Once the export clears, you will be provided with the tracking number.
That’s it. Happy shopping!
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