What a converter actually does
Every buying agent is a wrapper around the same three Chinese marketplaces. When a spreadsheet gives you a CNFans link, the useful part is not the CNFans domain — it is the numeric product ID buried in the query string. That ID is the seller's listing on Taobao or Weidian, and it is identical no matter which agent you route it through.
So converting a link is really two steps: pull the ID and the source platform out of whatever you were handed, then rebuild the URL in the format the destination agent expects. The formats differ more than people expect. Nine of the forty agents here use a query string in the shape ?shop_type=taobao&id=. Oopbuy puts the platform in the path. HooBuy uses a numeric code for the platform instead of a name. CSSBuy abandons query strings entirely and builds a slug like item-micro-6789012345.html. Kakobuy, Superbuy, AllChinaBuy, Sugargoo and Basetao all wrap the entire original URL, percent-encoded, as a parameter.
Recovering dead PandaBuy and WeGoBuy links
PandaBuy was seized in April 2024 and never came back. WeGoBuy shut in 2025. Between them they were the default agent in thousands of community spreadsheets, which means a large share of the W2C links still circulating on Reddit and Discord point at checkouts that no longer exist.
Those links are not worthless. The product ID inside them still resolves — the seller is usually still listing the same item on Taobao. Paste the dead link into the box above and the ID gets extracted and rebuilt against every agent that is still trading. A spreadsheet that looked like a write-off is generally 80–90% recoverable this way. The exception is items the original seller has since delisted, and no tool can fix that.
Which link should you copy?
Copy the address of the product page, not the shop, not a search result, and not the app's share text. On desktop that means the full URL from the browser bar including everything after the question mark. Three specific traps:
- Shortened links —
m.tb.cnandk.youshop10.comaddresses cannot be expanded from inside a browser tab, because the redirect is blocked by cross-origin rules. Open the short link once in a normal tab, wait for the real page to load, then copy the address that ends up in the bar. - App share sheets — the Taobao app copies a block of text with emoji and a code rather than a plain URL. The converter reads the URL out of it if one is present, but you will get a cleaner result pasting from a browser.
- Shop pages — a URL with no
id=in it is a storefront, not an item. There is nothing for an agent to add to a cart.
The 40 agents, and which formats they use
| Format family | Agents | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Query string | CNFans, MuleBuy, Joyagoo, OrientDig, LoveGoBuy, HipoBuy, iTaoBuy, EastMallBuy, USFans | /product/?shop_type={platform}&id={id} |
| Platform in path | Oopbuy | /product/taobao/{id} |
| Numeric platform code | HooBuy | /product/1/{id} — 0 is 1688, 1 Taobao, 2 Weidian |
| ID plus source flag | ACBuy | /product?id={id}&source=TB |
| Slug | CSSBuy | item-{id}.html, item-micro-{id}.html |
| Wrapped original URL | KakoBuy, Superbuy, AllChinaBuy, Sugargoo, Basetao | ?url={percent-encoded full URL} |
Once you have the link
Picking the agent is the next decision, and the fee is rarely what should decide it. Six of the eight agents whose rates we could verify charge nothing on the order itself — the money is made on the shipping quote and the exchange rate. The fee calculator lays out what each one actually takes on a basket of a given size, and the shipping calculator estimates the part that varies most.
If the item is footwear, run your foot measurement through the size converter before you order rather than after. Chinese listings quote EU numbers against a millimetre last, and the gap between what a listing says and what arrives is the most common reason a parcel gets returned.