JadeShip Blog

RepArchive Top/Live brings our 4 year old service back on the map with an original idea, executed in a fast and lightweight environment, with the goal to change the game for everyone.

This blog post will commemorate the launch and give you some information about the new page, as well as maybe some news about where it's heading and what's planned.

Go to RepArchive Top

What is RepArchive Top?

RepArchive top is quite evidently built on the basis of RepArchive Live, our website that launched in October 2020, that gave you a live overview on what others purchased from Taobao and Weidian through Wegobuy and Superbuy.

RepArchive Top expands the functionality of a live feed by accumulating information to tell you precisely what items have been selling best, in other words it tells you exactly what the most popular Taobao and Weidian items are. And if you want to look at the live feed, it's still there as well, with improved features!

RepArchive Top/Live has been developed for mobile and desktop in a variety of screen sizes.

What are the time frames and how should I use them?

24 hours: This tells you what has been bought the most over the last 24 hours. This is as close to the original live feed as it's gonna get, as it captures the most current trends, while still giving new items that you don't know yet a chance to make it on the list. It usually only takes 2 purchases to make it on the list, so at the bottom part you can find exciting new stuff and purchase upcoming bestselllers before they become mainstream.

7 days: After a week the list gets a bit more selective. The top positions have about 200 sales here, and it takes more than 10 sales to make the list. That means it's less random and does take an actual community effort for an item to be here.

30 days: We selected 1 month as the default setting, as this is a good balance between thorough selection and showing you new stuff you haven't seen before. To make the list, about 30 people have to buy an item, and to make the top it might take up to 500, so these are not random items, these are truly items that a lot of people are buying, where you can almost be sure that they are good deals. And still, 30 days is a narrow enough time frame to make sure that these trends haven't already died.

All time: If you want a top feed sorted by sales, this is it. And it's definitely cool and interesting. But the usability is lower than the 30 days category, since you will be seeing trends that have already died and when you come back the next day it might show exactly the same items as yesterday.

What are other cool little features?

You can see when an item was bought last and where the customer was from. This should also give you an idea how recent the data is. Usually, the update cycle should take less than 30 minutes for all time frames, but sometimes in that half an hour no one bought an item that made it onto any lists.

Of course you can also see the price of all items and a preview picture.

On top of that you have the option to instantly get to Wegobuy, Superbuy, Sugargoo and Cssbuy. For Weidian, only Superbuy and Wegobuy are available, as the other agents have no Weidian integration yet and thus a direct link can't be provided.

What's kind of neat is the Taobot integration. By clicking the little "?" you get to a guide to buy from the speicified site (Taobao or Weidian). If you click the big button up top you can ask taobot any question.

Something that definitely shouldn't be overlooked is the fact that the data is sourced from the agents Superbuy and Wegobuy and not Taoboa. As an end user that is kind of hard to appreciate, but we already made a move in the direction and allowed sorting Taobao and Weidian by sales, the old RepArchive.(we were the first to do that as well). But the results were disappointing. Not only was it unclear how reliable and honest these numbers were, our community was only a tiny fraction of the sales, and the majority domestic chinese customers. The bottom line was that the bestsellers were toothpaste and other household items, with the first piece of fashion (which would be what most of us come to RepArchive for) coming in somewhere in the teens. It was a plain T-Shirt that might as well predominantly have been bought by Chinese customers.

What's planned for the future?

What I would really like to do is provide more stats. For instance the dominance of Taobao vs. Weidian, or how the positioning of an item changed in comparison to the previous time frame. If this is coming? I don't know, it depends on how well RepArchive Top does, but generally I have the feeling it's only interesting for me and maybe a few other "pro" users, but for most regular customers this will be of no interest, meaning it's a waste of time and resources for me to develop this.

I definitely want to add more filters and ways to find what you are looking for in the list, without needing curation. For the higher levels of this goal I might have to use artificial intelligence.

Another thought that I have, that I can't really put a finger on yet is that I want this to incorporate sellers as well and not only items. But as I said, I'm not sure how I wanted this to look like and if it is even possible.

I also have to see if there are more time frames I want to add and if 200 is really the best amount to display. I guess time and community feedback will tell.

Released updates

Update notes for released updates can be viewed in the release notes blog category.