What sits in the address bar
CSSBuy uses a slug — item-675330534906.html, with the platform folded into the prefix. That is one of thirteen distinct URL families across the forty agents in the converter above, and the reason a spreadsheet built for one agent does not open in another without help.
A URL shape from before query strings won
CSSBuy builds product links as flat slugs: item-675330534906.html for Taobao, item-micro-… for Weidian, item-1688-… for 1688. No query string, no wrapped URL, no parameters at all.
That is a design from an earlier web, and it shows. It is also, incidentally, the most robust format in the converter for surviving a trip through a chat app — there is nothing after a question mark to truncate, and no encoding to mangle. Tigbuy and Pingubuy use the same idea.
Why old sheets are worth more than new ones
CSSBuy predates most of the agents in the converter, so CSSBuy-format rows tend to appear in the oldest spreadsheets in circulation — files assembled years before the current generation of agents existed.
Old sheets fail more often, because listings die. But the ones that survive point at sellers who have been trading continuously for years, which is a far stronger signal than anything a new sheet can carry. A five-year-old row that still resolves is evidence of a seller who has not disappeared, and that is exactly the thing that is hard to establish any other way.
What we do not have on CSSBuy
No verified fee, no verified Trustpilot figure, no confirmed storage window. The comparison we sourced covered eight agents and CSSBuy was not among them.
Its absence from our fee calculator is not a judgement — it is one of ten agents in that position, several of them long-established. It means we have no number we can stand behind, and a blank is more useful to you than a number we cannot source.
Practical next steps
An old sheet needs a different approach from a new one, because the failure rate is higher and the payoff is better.
Work it in two passes. First pass: paste rows into the converter and open the plain marketplace link it returns. Sort into alive and dead — expect a meaningful share to be dead, since these files predate the current agent generation. Second pass: for the dead ones, take the Chinese product name from any surviving row by the same seller and search it. Sellers who have traded for years usually relist rather than vanish.
What survives that process is worth considerably more than a fresh sheet, because every surviving row is evidence of a seller who has lasted. When a row is genuinely gone, the supplier catalogues are the next place to look.