Why GuaBase, and why read this Spreadsheet first
Two separate questions, answered honestly: whether GuaBase itself holds up, and what this independent site is actually for next to GuaBase's own Help Center.
Where GuaBase holds up
GuaBase's own pitch is built around visibility rather than a lowest-price claim: its homepage and About page both lead with “no markup on item prices” and a service fee shown before payment, not folded into a final number. Against the general trust signals on the Buying Safely page, that holds up on paper: a named operating entity (GuaBase, LLC, with Chinese-side support from Shanghai Kunqi Travel Consulting Co., Ltd.), a service fee you can reproduce yourself from a published rate, and a refund policy broken into stages rather than answered case by case.
Where it is worth staying clear-eyed: GuaBase is a young service by its own policy dates, Terms of Service effective August 1, 2026, Privacy Policy effective February 21, 2026, and its own pages do not yet agree with each other on 1688 support. Neither of those is disqualifying, but both are reasons to read the sourced pages on this site rather than take a single marketing line at face value.
The two-stage payment structure, pay for the item first, pay for shipping only after the warehouse has actually measured the parcel, is also a genuine point in its favour against a simpler alternative: a service that bundles an estimated shipping cost into the first payment either has to over-charge as a buffer or under-charge and surprise a buyer later. Splitting the two means the second number is a real quote, not a guess dressed up as one.
Consolidation and 90 days of free storage are the other practical advantage worth naming: for anyone ordering more than one item across more than one seller, the ability to let everything land at the warehouse before paying for shipping once is a real cost lever, even though GuaBase itself is careful not to overstate how much it saves in every case.
Why read this Spreadsheet instead of the help center directly
GuaBase's own Help Center is the primary source, and nothing here overrides it. What this site adds is organisation and cross-checking: pulling the service fee, the volumetric-weight formula, and the refund stages into one place with a working calculator, and flagging the two places GuaBase's own pages contradict each other rather than quietly picking one version.
The trade-off is currency: GuaBase can change a fee, a shipping line, or a policy date at any time, and this site's figures are only as fresh as their capture date. Every sourced number here carries that date next to it for exactly that reason, check it against the live page if it matters for a specific order.
Concretely, that means this site is a better starting point than an endpoint. Read the Glossary once to stop guessing at status names on an order dashboard, use the calculator on the Fees page to sanity-check a quote before paying, and come back to the Updates page if something has changed since the dates on each page. The actual purchase, payment, and parcel tracking happen on GuaBase, this site was never going to replace that, and does not try to.
A reasonable test for whether a page on this site earned its place: does it tell you something a plain reading of one GuaBase help article would not, either by combining several pages, by flagging a conflict between them, or by doing a calculation GuaBase's own interface leaves to you. The Choosing a Spreadsheet Site page applies that same test to this site as a whole, not just to individual pages.