What are QC photos, and how to find them for any link

What QC photos are

When you buy from Weidian, Taobao or 1688 through a shopping agent, the seller doesn't ship to you. They ship to the agent's warehouse in China. The warehouse opens the parcel, checks it's the right item, and takes photos - usually four to ten, sometimes with a tape measure or the item on a scale. Those are QC photos (QC is short for quality check).

The buyer then looks at their photos and decides: keep it and ship it home, exchange it, or return it to the seller while it's still cheap to do so. That decision is called giving a GL or RL.

Why other people's QC photos are worth so much

Every QC photo of an item someone else ordered is a free preview of yours. The same listing ships the same product to everyone, so if twenty earlier orders show the logo slightly off, yours will be too. A few minutes looking through old QCs tells you more than any seller description:

• The real colour. Seller photos are edited; warehouse photos are taken under the same plain light every time.
• Consistency. One good album might be luck. Fifteen good albums means the seller is reliable.
• Flaws that repeat. Loose threads in the same place, a wrong font on the tag, a sole that's too thick - if it shows up in several orders it's part of the product.
• Size and weight. Measurements and scale photos tell you how it fits and what it will cost to ship.

How to find QC photos for a link

1. Open the product you're thinking about - on Weidian, Taobao or 1688, or on your agent's site (Kakobuy, CNFans, ACBuy, Mulebuy, Hipobuy and so on).
2. Copy the link from the address bar, or use Share → Copy link in an app.
3. Paste it into the QC checker on the home page. You don't need to convert agent links first - QC Checker reads which product it is from the link itself.
4. You get every album from earlier orders, newest first, with the colour and size of each order and the warehouse it came from. Filter by your size to see exactly what you'd get.

If nobody has checked the product here before, QC Checker searches the agent warehouses for it while you wait. That first search takes up to a minute; after that the photos load instantly for everyone.

Which link to use

Any link that opens one product works. Shop pages, search results and category pages don't point at a product, so there's nothing to look up. If you have a short link from an app (the kind that starts with a random domain and a few letters), open it in the browser first and copy the full link it lands on. How product links work explains what to look for.

When there are no QC photos

New listings and rare items often have none yet. That doesn't mean the item is bad - just that nobody has ordered it through an agent we can see. Here's what I do then.