Module five of the guide
What you pay Basetao, and when each payment happens
There is no single price. There are three moments where money leaves, and the largest of them cannot be quoted until the parcel physically exists.
The bill, line by line
Six lines, three moments
Column three is the honest answer to how much. We do not publish rates, because they change and a stale rate is worse than none.
| Line | When it lands | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Goods price | At the order | The Chinese seller. Visible before you pay. |
| Domestic shipping | At the order | The seller, for delivery to the Basetao warehouse. |
| Service fee | At the order | Basetao. It has its own column in the official calculator output. |
| International freight | At the parcel | Depends on line, destination, actual weight and volumetric weight. |
| Insurance | At the parcel | 2 percent basic or 4 percent full of parcel value, stated for parcels up to 3500 CNY of product value. |
| Duty and tax | At your door | Your own customs. Basetao states these are outside its control and are the recipients responsibility. |
Line names read from the Basetao cost calculator and the customs and tax page, 2026-08-04.
How to drive the official calculator
It is public and needs no login, which is not true of every agent. It asks for three things: whether the parcel is Buy for me or Ship for me, the total value of the goods in CNY, the total weight in grams, and the destination country.
Below that it asks you to declare commodity attributes, because those decide which lines will take the parcel at all: brands, liquid, cosmetics, food, magnetic, watches, battery, powder. Then it returns one line per available shipping way, with the service fee, the customs fee and the shipping fee separated.
Two habits make it useful rather than decorative. Run it before you buy, with an estimated weight, so a surprise is a surprise on a screen rather than on an invoice. And run it twice, once with everything in one parcel and once split, if you are carrying anything bulky.
The one formula worth memorising
Dimensional weight, and why a light box can cost more than a heavy one
Basetao publishes the formula: length times width times height in centimetres, divided by 5000, gives the dimensional weight in kilograms. Most express couriers charge on whichever is larger, the actual weight or that number.
The page names DHL, FedEx and Aramex as couriers that do this, and recommends avoiding them for parcels with large items. It also notes that not every shipping line uses dimensional weight, and that those which do not all use the same divisor.
In practice this is why a puffer jacket, a structured bag or a plush toy can cost more to fly than something twice its weight. It is also why asking for soft items to be packed inside a backpack is the single packing request that changes a bill.
The official note on volumetric weight, in full
Reproduced here because it is the part of the calculator page people scroll past, and it is the part that explains the number they later argue about.
Three ways to spend less
None of them involve a coupon
Coupon values change constantly and we will not print one. These three are structural.
Fill the parcel you are already sending
Freight is charged per parcel. A second shirt in an existing box is close to free. A second box is a whole new bill.
Pay 1.5 CNY for a measurement
The homepage lists measurement on request at a 1.5 CNY handling fee. Against the cost of returning a garment that does not fit, this is not a close call.
Use the storage window on purpose
A hundred and twenty free days is long enough to gather several sellers into one shipment. It is also long enough to forget, which is a different problem.
Check duty before, not after
Import duty is set by your country and is not in any quote Basetao gives you. Your own customs website is the only reliable source.
The declaration question, answered honestly
Basetao states that import duties and taxes are not covered by its insurance, and that the only way it can help avoid them is to declare the parcel as a personal gift with a low value, or however else you ask it to describe the parcel.
That is a real sentence on a real policy page, and we are not going to pretend it is not there. What we will say is this: an under declared parcel that gets inspected becomes a customs problem, and the payout table treats a customs problem in your country as the worst covered outcome, at 33 percent under basic cover. You would be insuring against a risk you chose to take.
The exchange rate you actually pay
Every number on the Basetao side is in CNY. Your card is not. A conversion therefore happens at some point, and no official page names the rate it uses.
Notice where the currency changes
The freight calculator asks for the item total in CNY and the weight in grams. Its result table then carries item price, service fee, custom fee, shipping fee and total shipping fee in CNY, and one final column headed total in dollars. That last column is the only place a conversion appears, and no rate is printed beside it.
Measure it instead of assuming it
Put a round number into the calculator, read the CNY subtotal and the dollar total, and divide one by the other. Hold that number next to what a bank quotes for the same pair of currencies that morning. Whatever sits between them is the cost of the conversion, and it is charged on every line, not only the goods.
Check your own card as well
Your bank can levy a cross border charge of its own, which makes the agents internal rate only half the story. Set the amount that appears on the statement beside the dollar total you were quoted.