What "0% commission" is actually paying for
An agent with no service fee is not working for free. The margin has to come from somewhere, and there are three places it hides.
The exchange rate. You pay in dollars or euros, the seller is paid in yuan, and the agent picks the rate for that conversion. A spread of two or three percent against the mid-market rate is invisible on a receipt and larger than most service fees would have been. This is the main one.
The shipping quote. Agents resell freight they buy at contract rates. Two agents quoting the same line for the same box can differ by twenty or thirty percent, and nothing on either checkout page explains why.
Ancillary charges. Repacking, extra QC photos, insurance, storage past the free window. Individually small, collectively not.
The one agent where fees genuinely matter
Sugargoo charges roughly 5% service with a 10–15 CNY minimum, plus 4.8% and $0.50 on payment. It is the only agent in this table charging on both sides, and on a $300 basket that combination lands around $30 — real money against six competitors charging nothing visible.
That does not automatically make it the wrong choice. An agent with a transparent fee and a keen shipping rate can beat a 0% agent with a padded one. But it does mean Sugargoo is the one case where you should run the number rather than assume.
Ratings, and how much weight to give them
Trustpilot scores are third-party data, not our scoring, and the review count matters as much as the number.
| Agent | Score | Reviews | Read it as |
|---|---|---|---|
| MuleBuy | 4.7 / 5 | 2,813 | Highest score here on a solid sample |
| Joyagoo | 4.6 / 5 | 2,900 | Comparable, similar volume |
| CNFans | 4.2 / 5 | 13,300 | Much the deepest sample here — 17× Oopbuy, on the identical score |
| Oopbuy | 4.2 / 5 | 797 | Same score, thinner evidence |
| AllChinaBuy | 4.1 / 5 | 215 | Small sample, treat as provisional |
| HooBuy | 3.9 / 5 | 560 | Middling |
| Sugargoo | 3.4 / 5 | 630 | Below average, and the only one charging on both sides |
| KakoBuy | 2.5 / 5 | 74 | Lowest score on the thinnest sample — 74 reviews is not enough to conclude much either way |
The CNFans versus MuleBuy comparison used to be the interesting one here. MuleBuy scores half a point higher, but CNFans has been rated by more than four times as many buyers, and a 4.2 across 13,300 reviews is a better-evidenced result than a 4.7 across 2,813.
It is also the comparison that gets misreported most, because CNFans ended its affiliate programme in January 2026 and a great deal of what was published about it immediately afterwards came from people who had just stopped being paid by it. The rating above is unaffected by any of that, which is rather the point of using third-party data: 13,300 buyers are harder to move than a page of opinion.
KakoBuy deserves a caveat in the other direction. A 2.5 is poor, but 74 reviews is a small enough sample that a handful of bad shipping months could produce it. It also offers the longest free storage window here at 100 days.
Free storage, and why it is worth checking
Storage windows run from 90 days across most of the field to 100 at KakoBuy and Sugargoo, with CNFans tightest at 60. If you buy across several weeks and ship once, this is a real constraint rather than a footnote — running past the window means either paying storage or shipping earlier than you wanted.
Oopbuy is the one to verify personally. It advertises no service fee, but its storage terms are not published on a page we could reach, so confirm before you park a haul there.
The agents we could not verify
Superbuy, ACBuy, Basetao, CSSBuy, OrientDig, LoveGoBuy, HipoBuy, iTaoBuy, EastMallBuy and USFans are all supported by the link converter, but were not covered by the comparison we sourced. Rather than invent a percentage for them, they are left out of the calculator. Check the rate at their own checkout.