Here's a post about how I bought ziploc bags from Jingdong, a Chinese shopping app.
This is extremely boring for me. I use apps like Jingdong all the time, to buy really boring stuff like ziploc bags. But for those of you outside of China, perhaps you've never seen what the process is like to search for a product and check the options and prices and pay for it, with an interface entirely in Chinese. I think it's so fascinating how people in different parts of the world can have such different experiences, in the normal boring parts of their life, the things they do every day, which are so boring that they would never think to even talk about them.
Anyway, so, I need to buy some ziploc bags. Let's open up the Jingdong (京东) app on my phone and search for ziploc bags, which is 密封袋 [mì fēng dài] in Chinese.
Okay, so here are the search results. I click on one of them because I recognize it as a brand I've bought before.
Yeah this brand is fine, I've bought it before, they're just normal ziploc bags.
Let's take a look at the sizes that are available, and the prices. Click "加入购物车" (add to cart).
This doesn't immediately add it to your cart- instead, it shows a popup which has the different products you can choose from. We should pick one of these and then add it to the cart.
Okay so here are the different sizes. I think what I'm looking for is 中号 (medium) because that is 18 x 20.8 cm, that seems about right. "25只" means there are 25 bags in this box.
Anyway, after I select the right size of bags, I click 确定 (confirm) to add it to the cart.
Let's go back to the search results and see if there were any others I might want instead. Ah, here are ziploc bags which are actually Ziploc brand. Those are good.
Also, in the photo above, you can see a popup at the top of the screen- 4.9 yuan off when you spend 5 yuan! But it probably only applies to things I don't want to buy anyway, so let's ignore it.
Also, on the right, in the above photo, you can see a little video window popup, with a livestreamer showing us what ziploc bags are. I don't like these video popups. Especially when I'm doing this at work and then they start auto-playing sound.
Looking at the product details here, I see this is the kind with the little slider on the top. These are good if you have small children who can't be relied on to seal a bag properly.
I LOVE the little picture of the shriveled avocado. Like, wow look how bad your avocado looks, if you had a ziploc bag this wouldn't have happened.
The price is about 2 times the price of the other one we just looked at though. I guess I don't really need these; I'll just buy the cheaper ones.
Okay now let's check our shopping cart (购物车).
Great, the ones I selected are in here. Oh, what's this? “满20元送赠品” - if you spend 20 yuan, they will give you some kind of free item. Oh, let's click the little '+' sign so we have 2 boxes of ziploc bags, that will put us over 20 yuan.
Okay so I see some kind of little item has been added. Looking at this screenshot, I can't tell what it is, I guess maybe some kind of plastic bags for food storage. I actually can't remember if I got something like that when I later received these ziploc bags.
Oooh, also we can click “去换购”. 换购 means that since you spent a certain amount of money, they're offering you some discounts on other products (a similar thing to a "buy one get one half off" sale). Let's click on this and see what products we can get with this deal.
Okay, I see one of them is a box of 10 little milk boxes. My kids will drink those, and the price is good, so I'll go ahead and add that to my cart.
This is how they get you, though- they show you a bunch of things you don't need, and tell you you're getting a special discount (fact-check: sometimes it's not actually a discount, it's just the normal price).
Also sometimes the products available for this kind of deal are not good quality. So watch out, don't just jump on it because the price is low.
The image above shows what the shopping cart looks like after adding this milk. (This kind of milk doesn't need to be refrigerated, by the way, so there's no difficulty in shipping it.)
Today price is going to be 41.1 yuan. (This is somewhere around 6 USD.)
Let's click on 去结算 to check out.
This is the checkout page. You can see it shows the stuff I'm buying, and the prices.
Scrolling down, you can see if there are other fees, like shipping, and if I have any coupons or gift cards available.
Here you can see that the shipping (运费) is free. Also, it says you can get a discount if you sign up for some kind of card, I don't really know what this is, maybe a credit card. Probably best to not sign up for it if you don't know what it is! So let's not do that.
Next, you click 提交订单 (submit), and then it will open up WeChat and you can pay with WeChat Pay.
So that's the whole process. Usually when I buy things from Jingdong, they arrive that day or the next day, if the product name has 自营 [zì yíng] in red in front of it. 自营 [zì yíng] means something along the lines of, it's coming from Jingdong itself, rather than some third-party seller that is just using Jingdong as a platform to list their products. If I buy from Jingdong but it's not 自营 [zì yíng], it might take longer to arrive, like maybe 2 or 3 days, or sometimes longer than that.
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