Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

OT Box — is a ready-made online store filled with goods from China and Japanese marketplaces. We connect the most popular and relevant trade providers Taobao/Tmall, 1688.com, Yahooo!Japan. The site includes goods online storefront, which are automatically updated, price settings, currencies and deliveries, as well as the ability to translate the online store into other languages. The online store in installed on your domain.

Note! The OT box is a software product. To buy out and deliver products to customers, the services of a logistics company are required.

Testing OT Box is a simple and reliable way to evaluate the functionality of online store and try to be of its owner. The test site version doesn’t differ from a real online store. You will have the opportunity to see the site’s administrative part (admin panel), create a test order, set up pricing, catalog and delivery.

Testing takes place in Skype. A personal chat will be created for you with our specialists who will consult you about the OT Box work. Testing is free and unlimited in time. This will allow you to evaluate all the possibilities of our system and determine how the online store is convenient for using.

A personal Skype chat is created for each client. OT managers and technical specialists are added there, who will tell in details about the OT Box functionality. Skype chat is available at any time. On weekends, managers respond as soon as possible.

Communication is by messages in skype-chat, you don’t need a camera and microphone. Text communication allows you to restore the message history at any time, find the answer to a question that has already been asked. If necessary, you can call.

If you have never worked with Taobao/1688.com before, then first of all, you need to acquaint yourself with the basic scheme of work of Chinese marketplaces’ intermediaries.

To do this, we recommend you to read the following articles:

• Key factors for working with Taobao blog.otcommerce.com/businesssuccess
• How to become a Taobao middleman blog.otcommerce.com/agenttaobao2016

The articles describe the main aspects of working with China. We have specially prepared these articles to make it easier for beginners to understand how to work with China.

After purchasing OT Box, you become the full owner of the online store. Therefore, you are independently engaged in the organization and conduct of your business for profit. For our side, we provide technical support for the site.

To do this, we recommend you to read the following articles:

• Promotion of online store. You choose ways to attract customers to your site.
• Work with customers. You communicate with your customers and help them make purchases.
• This can be done through the feedback form, by phone or online chat, which is easily added to the site. You can do it yourself or hire operators.
• Pricing. You calculate your income and expenses, decide what markup to set for goods.
• Payment acceptance. Payments can be accepted through payment systems or in cash. You choose the scheme of work that is convenient for you. There are several payment systems to choose from, which we connect for free: box.otcommerce.com/products/integration-payment. There may be several payment systems on your site.
• Logistics. You can organize the process of buying out and delivery of goods to customers by yourself or find a proper logistics company for these purposes.
• Legal issues. You register your business and deal with other legal issues by yourself.

To install a website, you need a domain and hosting. You purchase the domain yourself. Please pay attention to the fact, that site cannot contain words «taobao», «tmall», «yahoo», «alibaba», «hitao», «koubei», «etao», «alipay», «tao» in domain and fixed area of address bar according to Taobao policy.

You also choose hosting to install your site. You can choose our OpenTrade Commerce Hosting or find another hosting, which must meet the following requirements:

• Processor: 2GHz Intel Xeon E5 family (Sandy Bridge)
• Disk: 10GB SSD
• Memory: 1280 MB (up to 6GB during short high loads)
• Access to website via ISP manager
• PHPMyAdmin
• Web mail (only to receive mail, not for mailings)
• Traffic volume (bandwidth) 200 GB

The time for site installation depends on the chosen hosting. To install OT Box on our OpenTrade Commerce Hosting (OH) will take one business day, not counting the day of application. Site installation on a third-party hosting takes 2-3 business days.

You don’t need to add products to the site manually. All products are automatically broadcast to the online store from Chinese and Japanese marketplaces: Taobao/Tmall, 1688.com, Alibaba, Ebay, AliExpress.

Information about goods, their descriptions, prices and conditions of internal delivery in China are transferred in real time via Chinese and Japanese marketplaces API: Taobao/Tmall, 1688.com, Alibaba, Ebay, AliExpress.

Product information (the product itself, price, discounts, etc.) is updated every 24 hours, and site search information is updated every 48 hours.

When a product detail page is opened for the first time, the information is taken directly from Taobao. At the same time, we do not store all Taobao products, since there are more than 800 million of them. Product information is cached in our database. Therefore, a short-term mismatch may occur. But this happens very rarely.

You can check the product’s relevance by clicking on the link to Taobao in the product detail page.

In OT Box, you can sell not only Chinese goods, but also any other goods according to the online store’s owner request. To do this, you need to connect “Goods from stock” module. Using this module you can manually add to the catalog any products which you want to sell in your online store. The module is an additional paid functional.

The work and development of the OT service platform is supported by service payments:

• automatic filling of the site with goods, descriptions, prices and data about vendors;
• automatic translation of marketplace content into different languages;
• development of new functional (additions, free updates);
• support of server work;
• fixing of errors, failures and malfunctions;
• consultations and technical support.

The user and order databases are an inseparable part of the OT service platform and are stored on our OT Commerce servers. This is due to the principle of the OT service platform work, on which all sites work. Existence of these databases on the side of OT Commerce services is mandatory for the platform and client site work.

Products are not stored in the database, they are broadcast from Taobao using API.

We are responsible for them and undertake to ensure their safety and confidentiality. We guarantee they won’t be available to third parties, and we won’t use them under any circumstances. This is officially approvedin our documents.

You aren’t just selling a product, but you are providing a service — assistance in finding and choosing goods for purchase. People mostly buy small and cheap goods on Aliexpress, because no one will help in choosing expensive goods.

For more expensive purchases, people go to other online stores which they trust and where they can find help to solve the difficulties encountered. Therefore, in the question of what is easier for people, there is no simple answer. If you organize work of your online store different from Aliexpress, then it won’t compete with you.

There is a detailed article about the difference between Taobao and Aliexpress in our blog  blog.otcommerce.com/taobao-vs-ali