Understanding Gmarket's Smile Cash, Smile Point, Gcash, Coupon and Gstamp

For Gmarket users, you would be familiar with the various payment supplements or benefits that Gmarket has. Log in to your Gaccount and you will be greeted with a overview of your points, gcash, coupon and gstamps. With so many different types of benefits, I wished they would streamline some of them or expand them to make staying loyal with Gmarket more worthwhile.

I will describe the uses of each benefit in order of their value i.e. from most valuable to least valuable.

Smile Cash
This is cash. Your refund, compensation or shipping fee differences will be returned to you via smile cash. Another way of getting smile cash is through converting your smile points (I will touch on this later).

Gcash
This is similar to Smile Cash in the sense that they are both cash. However, you can only receive Gcash through events by Gmarkets. Another difference is that while you can withdraw Smile Cash to your bank account, you can't do that for Gcash.

Smile Points
Once you reached 10,000 smile points, you can convert it to Smile Cash. They have an expiry date of two years from when you first received the points. You can receive smile points through the daily lucky draw or applying for it when you clocked certain days of attendance.

Coupons
In most instances, you will only encounter coupons during your purchase. You can either exchange for it using Gstamps (refer below), through daily lucky draw or the basic monthly coupons.

Here's where you can download your monthly coupons:

You can check the conditions, expiry date and amount of your coupon in your Gaccount:

The coupons can be applied to your purchased product either on the product page or in your cart.

Gstamps

Basically kind of useless. You can only use it to draw or exchange for coupons. Like I mentioned earlier, in most cases there will not be lack of coupons, so I seldom have to use Gstamps. They are also one of the easiest to obtain - from daily lucky day to writing product reviews.

Gmarket Haul #2

frankly speaking, this should be my 5th gmarket haul, but being the lazy me, i didn't blog about the 2nd, 3rd nor the 4th. this haul was ordered during the gmarket black week, aka 1111 (11 Nov). gmarket was having massive discounts, big coupons (20,000W off) and giveaways during black week.

i shall state up front that this was my most disappointing gmarket experience, and i will explain it shortly. before that, let's take a look at the items i bought this time round! shall start with the purchases that pleases me the most.

1) sleeveless turtle neck flare dress (US$15)
this dress fitted me so well! because of my long neck, i like tops/dresses with high neck or turtleneck. a very simple and classic little black dress. i'm on the tall side so many korean one-piece dress tends to be too short, but this was just nice. it doesn't look impressive in my lousy photo as it does when one wears it. i just hope it doesn't shrink after washing!

2) ecole lucy waterproof longwear eye shadow + roll-on makeup remover + lip tint (US$13)
this was such a steal! all these for only US$13, can you believe it?! it's a customizable set of makeup, and the makeup remover was the additional optional item. sorry, didn't manage to get a shot of the orange lip tint, but i will definitely do a makeup review when i try it on. these items were neatly wrapped in bubble-wrap and came in a big box.

3) IPKN starlight eyes (2 colours) + remover (US$9)
i couldn't find any english review of IPKN waterglow starlight eye shadow on the web, but decided to purchase it because of the subtle glittery effect it was supposed to give. their spokesperson is girls generation's tiffany! i did a swatch of one of the colours on my hand, seems pretty cool! again, like all korean cosmetics, it came neatly wrapped and in a big box.

4) henry tee (US$11)
a very simple looking tee, but i don't quite like the material. it doesn't feel like pure cotton and wrinkles easily. although it was neatly packed, but when i opened it, it was all wrinkly.

ok, now back to why i was disappointed with gmarket this time round. out of the 4 items, 3 were very good while 1 was just alright. the problem wasn't with my purchase, but those that i place an order for, but was subsequently cancelled. besides the above 4 items, i also ordered a colourful knit sweater (from same shop as the henry tee) and a checkered sundress. these two items were the most expensive out of the six, so naturally i applied the biggest discount coupons to these items.

for the knit sweater, they changed the status to 'preparing for delivery', only to change it to 'cancelled' a few days later. the money was refunded straight to my credit card. what makes me annoyed is i wasted my biggest coupon on this item which i could have use it on other stuff, and for a in-season item, i wouldn't expect it to be unavailable so soon. btw, they didn't give me the reason for the unavailability, and even after they refunded me, they continue to list the item on their page for people to order.

the sundress was still understandable because it is a off-season item and after they cancelled it, they changed it to "out of stock". the problem is they refunded me in the form of cash balance to my gmarket account. as i have mentioned in one of my earlier posts, such form of cash means you will have to make a purchase from gmarket again to utilize that money. sure you can withdraw it, but currently they only support withdrawing to a korean bank account.

A Guide to Shopping on Taobao

Just recently I took advantage of Taobao Single's Day (aka 11 Nov or 1111) sale to buy some stuff. It is a day when most Taobao minishop will offer discounts and the volume of transaction can get really big. I don't use any buying agent for my purchases. Taobao SEA has it's own forwarding agent to help deliver whatever I buy to me (currently it only applies to certain destinations like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia etc.).

This guide here is meant to teach you how to shop like a pro on Taobao and what are the things to look out for. Whether you are using a buying/forwarding agent or not, most importantly it is to navigate to the product you like and have that bit of assurance that it is not a scam shop.

#1 Taobao vs Tmall
At the Taobao main page, you will see a link to Tmall (天猫) just below the Taobao logo. Tmall is part of Taobao and most buying agent can help you purchase from both.While Taobao minishops can be set up by individual, selling/re-selling anything, Tmall shops can only be set up by companies. You will definitely get more consistent quality/service over at Tmall than at Taobao because Tmall has stricter guidelines to follow e.g. 7 days refund policy, delivery time no later than x days. Tmall shops are usually of the company's own brand, hence the authenticity of the product. Major international brands like Reebok, Nike, Prada are listed on Tmall together with domestic brands like Li Ning and 361degrees.

#2 Seller Reputation
Taobao has a seller reputation rating as denoted by the number of hearts/diamonds/crowns, with the crowns indicating more reputable. The seller reputation is usually indicated just below the name of the minishop. For each transaction, the buyer is allowed to give a rating of Good, Average or Poor to the seller. A 'Good' rating will earn the buyer 1 reputation point, a 'Average' rating earns no points, and a 'Poor' rating will cause a deduction of 1 point. Clicking on the rating will bring you to a page whereby they give you more in-depth statistics on the seller's performance, even comparing the seller to other sellers selling similar products. Personally I don't recommend looking into such in-depth statistics because it might confuse you more, and unless you can read Chinese, it will take up some time.

 

#3 Product Review Quickview

If you can't understand Chinese, one quick way to get a sense of what others say about a product, is to look at the 'People's Opinion' (大家印象). It is located in the 2nd tab when you scroll down to see the product description. It is a system-generated cloud of words that are frequently said by reviewers of the product. An orange box is a positive comment, while a grey box is a negative one. You can use google translate to help you with these key words, rather than translating the reviews which can be colloquial at times. Using the screenshot below as an example, the orange boxes are 'overall good', 'thick material', 'pretty design', 'looks beautiful wearing it', 'true to size', 'very comfortable', 'good attitude', 'nice packaging', 'decent delivery'. The grey one says 'weird smell'. 

Note: Only products with a significant number of reviews will have this 'People's Opinion' function.

#4 Taobao Gold Coins

This is only applicable for those who can add items to cart and check out the purchases. For those who uses a buying agent, you will not be able to make use of this benefit.

It is basically a loyalty system whereby you login each day to collect your daily gold coins, with more gold coins given if you login on consecutive days (http://taojinbi.taobao.com). The gold coins can then be used to offset the cost of certain purchases when you check out your items. 100 gold coins = ¥1. 

Tip: You can earn double gold coins daily by downloading the Taobao mobile app and clocking in your attendance there. There are also other ways to earn more gold coins (doing mission, lucky draw etc.) which I don't recommend you wasting your time to do so.

#5 Check for Discount Voucher

Always check for any discount voucher that the minishop might provide before making payment. At the cart view, if there are any discount vouchers, it will be indicated as 优惠券 right next to the shop name. Click on it and you can then collect a voucher by clicking on '领取'. At this point, you have only downloaded the voucher but have not applied it to the product you are going to buy. Proceed to make the payment. At the payment page, the system would have automatically included the discount under '店铺优惠'. In the event that you have several vouchers, you can click on the drop down to select the most beneficial to you.

Note: Some vouchers will have a minimum amount spent requirement hence you might be able to download the voucher but not able to use it.