Owing to Ming’s comments about having to decipher 86OF’s website, I felt I could help some readers out there who may be confused 86OF’s workflow and website. As of now, 86OF’s website is still a mix of English and Chinese, and the terminology they have adopted can be incomprehensible to even novice users of ezbuy.
All parcel forwarders work more or less the same way, and 86OF is no different. First, you sign up an account to get a shipping address from the parcel forwarder that contains a specific code to identify you. Next, you can proceed to do your purchase and have your goods sent to 86OF’s warehouse, using the shipping address you have obtained. The address is stated in the member centre home page, under the Warehouse tab. IMPORTANT NOTE: the address may change from time to time, so do check the warehouse address EVERY TIME and update the address entry on Taobao if necessary before you check out.
Update 24 Mar 2017: With the launch of their Clementi and Woodlands office, they have introduced a different look and feel for the websites associated with these offices (the websites are cm.86of.com and wl.86of.com respectively), but the “Member Centre” (用户中心) dashboard is more or less the same, albeit only in Chinese now, so the rest of this post is still relevant if you can read Chinese. Some quick translation: 包裹预报 = Parcel forecast, 在仓包裹 = Parcels list, 已经海运 = Shipping/shipped.
To notify 86OF about your impending goods delivery to their warehouse, you submit a “Forecast” entry. This is equivalent to submitting a new order under “Not Arrived” in ezbuy. Unlike ezbuy whereby you need only to enter your Taobao purchase order number, you have to enter the details of the domestic courier company (“Express”) and tracking number (“No”) for your shipment. The “交易单号” is the Taobao order number, and this is apparently an optional entry.
You need to list the items included in your parcel/order. Just copy and paste the Chinese product description into the “Item” column. The price column is a bit confusing – since you’re asked to indicate the quantity, should you enter the unit price or total price? What i resort to doing is to always enter the total price and 1 as the quantity.
To add on additional items into the items list, click on “Add item” next to the description “Please fill item”. Totally non-intuitive.
In case you forgot to submit a forecast entry, you’ll need to perform a “claim parcel” when your parcel has arrived at the warehouse (you’ll know by looking at the tracking 物流 information provided in Taobao).
When you have selected the courier company and entered the tracking number, you need to hit enter or click 搜索 (it’s actually a button) to bring up the parcel record. There is no instruction given that tells you to do this. Anyway, once the parcel record is shown, you will need to list the items in the parcel in the same way you as for submitting a forecast entry.
For every parcel that arrives at the warehouse, you will receive an SMS notification (may be delayed by a few days). Once all the parcels have arrived, you can submit to ship the parcels from “parcels list”, but before you can submit, you need to top up your account with sufficient funds to pay for the shipping.
Thereafter, the shipment will be listed in “shipping/Shipped”. You should get an SMS when the shipment is ready for collection, but as I’ve found out, it is possible that they don’t do so in a timely manner. You can always enquire with the customer service should there be any delay. Just quote the 4 digits shipment number “运输号” to reference your shipment.
Leave a Reply to Ariel Cancel reply