After you have chosen
The words on the screen, and what each one commits to
Judging the find is the hard part. What comes after it is a screen full of short words that look obvious and are not, and the difference between an official word and a community word decides whether anybody is accountable for it.
QC is the inspection OrientDig runs in its own warehouse. The home page states it plainly: once your goods arrive, free high definition QC photos are provided. That is a published commitment and you can hold them to it.
GL and RL are seller slang for green light and red light, meaning other buyers judged a production run acceptable or not. Batch is the same world: one run of one copy. None of the three appears on any OrientDig page, nobody is accountable for them, and a listing that leans on them is telling you about a reputation rather than about the item in front of you.
Mail restriction is an official field, and it sits on the shipping estimator rather than on the listing. Volumetric weight is the one that catches people out: light and bulky is charged by the space it occupies, which is why a plush toy can cost more to move than a pair of jeans.
How to read the QC photos you get back
QC photos are evidence of a narrow set of claims. Read them for those claims and then stop, because the photographs will not answer anything else.
Count and completeness first. Everything you ordered, plus whatever the listing promised was in the box. A gap here is the warehouse problem, and it is the one thing that is cheap to fix at this stage.
Labels against your order, not against your memory. The marked size and the colourway on the tag, compared with the line on your order. The listing photo is the seller intention; the QC photo is the fact.
Then construction, which nobody promised. Stitching, panel lines, hardware, the way a sole meets an upper. This is where your own minutes are worth more than the warehouse minutes, because it is outside what the inspection was ever doing.
Colour last, and lightly. Warehouse lighting and phone cameras both shift colour. Treat the photo as proof the item exists in roughly that shade.
One thing worth knowing before you need it: the official Q and A says you can contact order support to arrange a return or exchange before the parcel leaves the warehouse. After it ships, that door is shut.
Where the money goes
The service fee is zero, and the exchange rate is not
OrientDig charges no service fee on standard orders, and that is true and also not where your money leaks. Your order is priced in CNY and you pay in your own currency, so a rate gets applied somewhere in between, and the gap between that rate and the mid-market one is a margin nobody prints on a receipt.
A third party measuring that gap across agents on %s put OrientDig at about twelve percent over the mid-market rate with a zero service fee. The chart below adds the fee back in for the two agents in the set that do charge one, because comparing fees alone gets the ranking backwards.
Two things follow. Compare agents on the converted total of a real basket, never on the advertised fee. And re-check before a large order, because a rate measured on one day is a measurement, not a policy.
Measured by qcradar.com on 2026-10-08, their table updated 2026-10-02. We do not link it: the page sits behind a challenge that blocks us as well.
How to choose an agent you can hold to something
Every agent runs the same shape: you find something, they buy it with a Chinese account, it lands in their warehouse, they inspect and store it, then you pay to move it. The shape is not where they differ.
Is the inspection scope written down, including what it leaves out, rather than implied by a marketing line. Is there a published commitment you could point at later such as free QC photos after arrival or a stated processing window. How long is free storage, because that clock decides whether you can wait to combine parcels. What does the conversion cost, which is the section above and the number that moves most.
What should make you walk away: no published inspection terms, no named support route, and a storage clock you cannot find before you order. An agent that publishes a number is an agent you can argue with.
The other agents you will hear about
You will meet a long list of agent names in the same forums that produced GL and RL, usually attached to a claim that one of them is cheapest. That claim is almost always built on the service fee, and the service fee is zero at most of them, so it settles nothing.
What actually separates them, in the order it will cost you money: the conversion rate, the free storage window, which shipping lines they can reach for your country, and whether their inspection terms are written down anywhere you can quote back. None of those is a score, and we do not publish one, because the things people argue about hardest, service quality and whether an order gets handled properly, have no public measurement anybody can reproduce.
Read the chart above as a range rather than a league table. On the day it was measured the spread across those seven ran from a fraction of a percent to roughly twelve, with OrientDig among the higher of them. That is a real cost, and it is also one dimension of several, measured once.
