Agents help foreigners navigate Taobao

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Many people around the globe agree China's principal shopping website Taobao is very useful - yet not at all foreigner-friendly.

No problem. Foreigners don't have to actually use Taobao to, well, use Taobao.

One thing the vast variety of Taobao products proves - think deer placenta, vanilla cookies for hermit crabs and helicopters - is supply accompanies demand.

An entire sector of third-party Taobao agents has developed to abet foreigners aspiring to shop on the e-commerce site.

Agents provide language support - the website is almost entirely in Chinese but agents employ polyglots - and assistance with payments for foreigners without yuan, let alone Alipay, China's answer to PayPal, and a host of other services.

They typically charge 5 to 10 percent of the order's cost. One of their primary purposes should be quality-assurance, says Harry Kwok, general manager for Taobao agent Obook.

"Taobao is a market that's not so regulated compared to overseas markets and has many traps by which inexperienced buyers may be scammed," Kwok says. "So you need to pay agents to help you avoid the risks."

Insider knowledge should be part of what you're paying for, Obook's operations and customer support manager Christy Li says.