HubbuySpreadsheet Rulebook

Sixteen category walls, and how to judge what sits on them

A category wall is the easy part. The hard part is reading a single listing well enough to know whether it will survive a warehouse inspection, a customs desk and a return window. That is what the rest of this page is about.

Searching here jumps straight into the catalogue. Ordering happens on the operator's site.

The sixteen category walls

Each wall is a scrollable page of product cards in one category. Open a card and you land on the catalogue listing, which carries the original seller link and the pictures the seller published. Women wear is the one exception in the set: it has no wall of its own and opens as a search instead, which is worth knowing before you go looking for it in the list.

The reason to browse by category rather than by search is that the rules cluster by category. Everything sealed lands in the same corner of the return rules. Everything with a battery or a liquid in it lands in the same corner of the shipping rules. Walking a wall shows you that pattern in a way a search box never does.

16 categories

A black suede sneaker, three white stripes along the side, a cream heel patch and toe, and a gum rubber sole, shot side on against white.Sneakers

Ask what the shoe boxes do to the parcel before you order five pairs. Keeping them is your own call at the warehouse, and it is the choice that meets a size limit long before it meets a weight limit.

A jacket built from a quilted charcoal front panel with two chest pockets, black sleeves and a black stand collar, zipped shut on white.Outerwear

A winter coat is bulk before it is weight. Read what a route will carry first and choose the coat second, rather than finding the ceiling after the box is already packed.

Two zip-up hoodies on wooden hangers hung from a gold rail, one light gray and one dark navy, above a small round white table.Hoodies

Plain cotton is the case where nothing goes wrong, which makes it a sensible first order. You find out what the warehouse checks while nothing much is riding on the answer.

A white T-shirt on a wooden hanger laid out on gray felt, a small green mark printed high on the chest, a second hanger beside it.T-Shirts

Cheap and light is not the same as unexamined. The box still gets opened, and on a T-shirt it is usually the print rather than the shirt that gets looked at.

Two pairs of black distressed jeans laid out on white, the left studded across the knees and still tagged, the right marked with a block of small white text on the pocket.Jeans

Denim is heavy for how little room it takes up. Weight is the one limit you cannot talk your way around once the parcel is sealed, so work it out before you consolidate rather than after.

A model photographed from the chest down in white straight-leg sweatpants and white sneakers, with the same pants folded beside him in gray, cream and pale yellow.Sweatpants

The top and the bottom of one outfit reach the warehouse as two pieces, not as one purchase. Count pieces when you read a fee table, because pieces are the unit the bands are written in.

A glossy black puffer with a brown fur-trimmed hood, laid open on a gray mat over a yellow floor, its paper tag still attached.Womenswear

Womenswear has no section of its own here, so this card hands a keyword to the search instead. What comes back shifts as sellers relist, so save the link to an item and not to a page of results.

A pink and green soccer shirt with the number 22 across the front, three white stripes on the shoulders and a crest at the chest, shown on a display form against white.Jerseys

Team shirts carry names, numbers and crests that belong to somebody else. That is the ground the operator states its counterfeit clause on, and the clause is short enough to read before you order.

A black nylon camera bag with a small matching pouch clipped to its strap, standing on gray marble in front of a carved white flower panel.Bags

Once the value climbs, the question stops being postage and starts being cover. Find the ceiling that applies on your route before you decide what the box is worth to you.

A black monogram canvas baseball cap, gold lettering across the front and a green and red stripe running over the crown.Hats

A cap is cheap to buy and cheap to replace. Whether it is worth covering has a real answer, and the answer comes from the published figures rather than from what you paid.

A tan tooled leather belt coiled on white, with a large antique gold buckle cast with a longhorn bull's head.Belts

Accessories go in last, when the order is already sitting near the edge of a band. One more small piece can be the piece that moves the whole parcel into the next one.

Frameless sunglasses, a single rose-tinted lens wrapping across both eyes on thin gold arms, lettering etched along its lower edge, on white.Eyewear

Lenses break. Breakage is where the gap between a covered route and an uncovered one stops being an abstraction and turns into a figure you either can or cannot claim.

A fine rose gold chain with a swan pendant, its body a single pink stone and its wing set with small clear stones, on white.Jewelry

Small, valuable and easy to lose inside a full parcel. This is the category where the cap on a claim matters more than anything you are going to save on shipping.

A steel watch with a blue embossed dial, applied numerals and a date window, on a blue rubber strap against black.Watches

One watch can be worth more than everything else in the box put together. Read what the route would actually pay out before you decide it travels with the rest of the order.

A dark navy fragrance bottle beside its black box on white cloth, with dried cotton stems behind it and a line of Chinese text burned into the lower left corner.Perfume

Fragrance is alcohol, and alcohol is the plainest example of the difference between restricted and prohibited. Work out which of the two words applies before you order, not afterwards.

Cream over-ear headphones lying flat on white, with the maker name set in large black letters in the top corner of the frame.Electronics

A battery picks the route before you do. Find out what can still carry the parcel, and whether it can be covered at all, while you are still deciding whether to buy it.

Reading a listing before you commit to it

Four checks, in the order that saves the most money. None of them requires you to speak Chinese, and all four can be done from the listing page before anyone has been paid anything.

  1. Decide which rule family the item belongs to

    Does it contain a liquid, a powder, a magnet or a battery? Is it sealed from the factory? Is it branded? Each answer sends the item into a different rulebook, and two of those rulebooks can stop it from shipping at all. The lists that decide it.

  2. Check how many pictures the seller actually published

    A listing with one picture gives the warehouse nothing to compare against when the inspection photographs come back. You cannot dispute a difference you have no reference for.

  3. Ask whether it could be inspected even in principle

    The operator states that it checks appearance and accessories and does not power equipment on. For anything electrical, the inspection will not tell you whether it works. What inspection covers.

  4. Work out what it would cost to be wrong

    Add the domestic shipping back to the seller, the shipping out to the seller again, and the service fee for that month. On a cheap item that total can exceed the item. The fee ladder.

Who is responsible for what is in the box

This is the sentence to read before you spend anything. The operator states, in its own disclaimer, that everything offered through its purchasing service comes from third party platforms and is not sold by it, and that it therefore does not take liability for intellectual property or copyright problems with those goods.

That is not a loophole, it is the actual structure of the arrangement, and it is the same structure everywhere in this industry. What it means for you is that the seller is the counterparty for quality and the operator is the counterparty for handling. Sorting a complaint starts with working out which of the two you are actually complaining about. The rest of the disclaimer, clause by clause.

Bold paragraph stating that products shown for the shopping agent service come from third-party shopping platforms and are not directly sold by the operator.
The liability paragraph of the disclaimer, stating that goods come from third party platforms and are not sold by the operator. Source: Disclaimer for Proxy Purchase and Shipped Goods.Enlarge source excerpt

Choosing a product discovery site worth using

There are a lot of these sites now, including this one, and most of the differences between them are invisible until something goes wrong. These are the questions that separate them, written as questions you can answer by looking rather than by trusting.

Does it say where a number came from
Any site can print a shipping time or a compensation ceiling. The useful ones tell you which page it was read from and on what date, so you can check whether it still says that.
Does it distinguish the seller from the agent
Sites that blur the two will tell you an agent guarantees quality. No agent in this model does. The published disclaimer above says so in the operator's own words.
Does it show you the rule or summarise it
A summary is somebody reading for you. On a dispute you need the sentence, because the wording decides it. Screenshots with a source link beat paraphrase.
Does it ever tell you not to buy
A catalogue that has no opinion about which categories are risky is a catalogue optimised for clicks. Sealed goods, electricals and anything with a battery genuinely are harder, and a useful site says so.
Can you tell who is writing it
A named editor and a working address is a low bar, and a surprising number of sites in this niche do not clear it. Who writes this one.
Table headed Special Standards with two columns, product category and the condition each category has to meet, showing the first three rows.
The head of the special standards table, with the first rows: new sneakers with anti-theft clasp and sticker intact, and sealed categories whose one-time packaging must remain sealed. Source: Return and Exchange Service.Enlarge source excerpt

The sealed item problem, decided at the moment you order

There is a category of purchase where the decision to keep it is made before you ever see it. The operator publishes a table of what it calls special standards: conditions an item has to still be in for a return to be possible at all. For a long list of goods that condition is the factory seal, unbroken.

Read that against the inspection rules and the trap becomes obvious. The warehouse will not open a sealed item, so you cannot have it checked. If you ask for it to be opened, it stops being returnable. There is no third option, and the choice is yours at the point of ordering rather than at the point of delivery. The full table of conditions, category by category.

Judging a seller from the listing alone

The operator names seller credit as one of the risk categories in its own disclaimer, and it names a specific signal: whether the shop has passed a credit level on the platform and whether the platform guarantee applies. You can check most of that from the listing page. What follows splits the signals into ones you can verify and ones that only look like signals, which is as close as this site gets to a rule for how to judge a seller you have never bought from.

Worth checking

  • Platform credit level, and whether the platform guarantee scheme covers the shop. The operator flags this itself. Where it says so.
  • Whether the listing is a fixed price or a deposit. A deposit order on a Chinese platform cannot simply be cancelled, and an unpaid balance forfeits it.
  • Whether anything about the item is customised. Customised goods sit outside the return guarantee entirely, and evidence of what you asked for has to come from the chat with the seller.
  • How recently the listing was updated, and whether the pictures are the shop's own photographs or lifted from a brand.

Not worth anything

  • Sales counts. They tell you the shop has been busy, not that it shipped the thing in the picture.
  • Star ratings on a translated listing. The translation layer flattens the text that would tell you what the complaints were about.
  • A long description. Length is free.
  • Any promise about customs, tax or delivery speed made in a listing. The seller has no visibility of the route your parcel will take. What decides that.