Buying a Laptop in China
Step 0: Is it better to buy a laptop in China or overseas?
Warranties, power supply, OS language, manuals - all need to be considered. You may get an international warranty, but can the manufacturer repair it locally? Cost is obviously also an issue - do your price checking on both Chinese and local sites. Savings that could be made in the past may have been wiped out by currency fluctuations. My general advice is to buy it where you’ll use it.
Step 1: Choosing a laptop.
Do this online. Consult reviews, decide what features are important, then narrow the selection down. If you then need to try a few hands-on, then head out to your local computer emporium (more later), make it clear to sales people that you’re definitely buying but you don’t know exactly what yet, and tap away on a few keyboards and gaze at a few screens. Once you’ve decided don’t buy immediately unless you’ve already done Step 2, and ignore ‘today only’ offers. Everyday is today.
Step 2: Price-checking.
You do NOT want to go out shopping not knowing what you should be paying. Asking three sellers and assuming the lowest is the ‘right’ price is not the way to go. At this stage you do need to delve into the Chinese Internet, using sites like zol.com.cn, it168.com and pcpop.com to check the 报价 (quoted prices) for laptops from a range of sellers. Here’s the 报价 page for a Lenovo Thinkpad. Note the cities listed at the top - check for local prices. Also look at Ebay equivalent Taobao.com. Amazon.cn has a limited range also.
Step 3. Buying your laptop
Any Chinese city will have some kind of 电脑城 or 电子城 - a computer or electronics ‘city’, a multi-storey market of individual sellers of everything from mp3 players to consumables to computers. Buying a laptop here can be overwhelming as they’re often very busy (if at all possible, go during the week), noisy, and lots of people are talking to you in Chinese about computery things.
Assuming you’ve got your price-checking right, the cost of your laptop shouldn’t be too far off what you expect. There’s not much more scope for negotiation, but you may get a few percent off, or have some accessories thrown in - a mouse and bag, a RAM upgrade at cost or close to it, etc.
Legit and grey market (行货 and 水货). There are tarrifs on imported electronics, and even if a laptop has been made in China, it may be classed as imported as far as customs are concerned. 行货 means legitimate products, 水货 are basically smuggled one way or another. However, that doesn’t mean a 水货 laptop is destined to fall apart or break - it just means the tarrif hasn’t been paid. Watch out for warranty issues though.
Receipts: You need to look for two kind of receipts. A tax receipt will specify how much has been spent, where, and on what generally - ‘computer products’ for example. You should also have another, likely hand-written, receipt specifying the computer model. If you needed to come back to the seller and prove that you bought this machine, here, that’s what you need. Foregoing a tax receipt can result in a discount - specify from the beginning if you need one or not.
Buying Online
There’s no reason you can’t buy a laptop online - Taobao.com, Amazon.cn, contacting a seller via the 报价 pages and having them deliver it. If you know exactly what you want, this may well be the easier option.
So, who wants to pull that apart?
Caveat: If you’ve found this page because you’re looking at buying a laptop FROM China while you’re overseas - avoid any too-good-to-be-true cheap electronics deals. They’re good-enough-to-be-scams.