You are on this branch: Headroom home / Guide
Guide: ordering through Pandagoo, step by budget step
Nine landings from sign-up to unboxing, each with what the archived Pandagoo site showed and what that step does to the total you set. The site itself did not load on October 24, 2026; this is the process as it was archived on March 8, 2026.
Nine landings, and the two that charge you
Read the guide once before your first order. If you only remember one thing, remember that money leaves twice: at the goods checkout and, weeks later, at the freight checkout. Both pay the handling charge.
Sign up and pass the email gate
Pandagoo's archived sign-in page took an email address and a password, and also offered a Discord login. After signing up, the site asked you to verify your email, and the reminder dangled a shipping coupon package described as worth CNY 1,080.
For your ceiling: leave coupons out of the plan. A coupon package is a set of conditional discounts on freight, and the archive does not say which lines or weights they covered. If one applies at the freight checkout, the saving is a bonus, not part of the budget.
Drop a listing link into Pandagoo or search it
The search field in the archived interface took either a product name or a listing address. Paste the address of a Taobao, Weidian or 1688 listing, such as the ones on our floor cards, and the agent page shows the item with its options in English. For shops it could not read, there was a manual purchase form where you typed the link, the option, the unit price in yuan and the quantity yourself.
For your ceiling: the agent page should show the same first price tier and starting quantity as the listing. If it does not, the listing changed, and the floor on our card may no longer be right.
Option choice and Pandagoo's warning pop-up
Choose colour, size and quantity. Before some orders, Pandagoo showed a commodity risk warning, and the order only continued once you ticked that you had read and accepted the risks.
For your ceiling: this is where the option gap opens. The price shown after you pick an option is the one that counts, not the headline. The archived page also asked you to double-check prices, quantities and shipping fees on Weidian and secondhand listings in particular.
Goods checkout, opening charge of two
The cart total runs through the handling formula and becomes the first payment. Archived payment routes included cards, PayPal, an electronic check that could take 3 to 7 days to confirm, and your account balance. Each order had a pay-by time, after which it was cancelled.
After payment, the archive says paid orders were handled during Beijing office hours, nine to six local time.
For your ceiling: pay for everything you plan to ship together in one checkout where you can. The fixed part of the handling charge is paid once per payment.
Seller to warehouse
The agent buys from the seller, who posts the item to the agent's warehouse in China. Sometimes a seller changes the price or the postage after the order is placed; the archived order screens had states for paying a difference, and an option to authorise the deduction of a difference.
For your ceiling: keep a few dollars of slack for a price difference. A ceiling planned to the cent will trip over the first one.
Arrival snapshots and a long free shelf life
When the item arrives, the warehouse photographs it. By default each item got five warehouse photos, more if you asked, at no cost, and it could stay in storage free for 300 days from arrival.
For your ceiling: this is the cheapest moment to fix a mistake. A wrong colour sent back from here costs domestic postage; sent back from your home it costs international freight as well. How to read the photos in order of cost is on the parcels page.
Assemble the parcel, rehearsal optional
Pick the items that will travel together and generate a parcel. The archive offered an automatic quote, based on item weights and paid up front with a top-up or refund after packing, or a manual quote by the warehouse within 8 hours for parcels handed in from nine to four, Beijing time.
There was also a rehearsal package: the warehouse packs your items for a fee, so the true weight and dimensions show up ahead of the freight payment. The fee per rehearsal was a number from the server and was not archived; a refund was possible only before processing began.
For your ceiling: a rehearsal turns the freight gap from a guess into a figure, which matters most on the second and top floors.
Freight checkout inside seventy-two hours
Once the parcel is quoted, you pay freight, again through the handling formula. The archived text gave 72 hours after submitting the parcel, after which it was cancelled. Paying by PayPal, the delivery address had to match the PayPal account. The parcel form also asked for a declared value in dollars, within a range of 1 to 120.
For your ceiling: this is the second payment, and the one budgets forget. Cancelling after paying freight cost a 20 yuan fee.
Opening the box and the short complaint window
When the parcel arrives, open it on camera. The archived after-sales text asked for a complaint inside three days of the parcel arriving, with unboxing photos and a video as proof. Returns to the seller went through the warehouse, and a refund the seller agreed to came back to your balance within 12 days.
For your ceiling: a refund to balance is not money back on your card. If you are not going to order again, a return is worth less than it looks.
Ready to price a real order? Start in the Headroom finder, then pick from the four floors.