The catalogue, by category

A PonyBuy Spreadsheet is a product catalogue kept by someone other than the agent: finds collected into categories, so you can look through them by the kind of thing you want rather than by whoever happened to post it. Ours is the sixteen cards below. Each one opens a category in the catalogue, and the line beneath it says what a warehouse photograph usually manages to settle for that kind of item.

That last part is the only editorial judgement on this page, and it comes straight from PonyBuy inspection scope. Shoes and bags are largely settled by appearance, so the photographs do a lot of work. Electronics are barely settled at all, because inspectors do not switch them on.

Every order gets the standard set. PonyBuy describes it as three standard photographs of different angles, front, back and side or logo, taken from fixed angles according to the warehouse standard for the category. You cannot change the angles, but you can ask for a re-take at no cost when a photograph comes out blurred.

The other kind you order and pay for. Detailed photographs are taken to your written instruction: a close up, a zoom, the measurement of one specific part. PonyBuy caps the quantity per request and publishes the per photo price on the same page.

One warning before you order any: the page shows two different prices for the same service, one in the body text and one inside the ordering dialog. Read whichever figure the dialog shows you at the moment you confirm, and treat any number written on this site or anywhere else as out of date.

Reps buying runs on two vocabularies that sound like one. Half of these terms come from PonyBuy own documentation and carry rules; the other half come from the community and carry none. Mixing them up is how people end up arguing with customer service about a promise nobody ever made.

Before the photographs, before the seller, there is a plainer question: will PonyBuy buy the thing at all, and will the shipping line carry it. PonyBuy publishes the answer as a scope document rather than as a policy page, and it is more restrictive than most buyers expect.

It names the categories it treats as sensitive: precooked meat, mobile phones with batteries, magnetic components, power banks, branded clothing, liquids, powders, compressed gas, gold and silver jewellery, diamonds, coins and antiques. Several of those are ordinary reps purchases. Perfume is a liquid. A watch with a battery is an electronic item. A magnetic clasp on a bag is a magnetic component.

It also says something that sits oddly next to a reps catalogue, and it is worth reading in its own words: the quality of Taobao merchants is uneven, PonyBuy cannot do professional identification for professional digital products, and it recommends you select high quality sellers yourself. The agent is telling you where its own competence stops.

Short answers, because the longer ones live on the pages this site links to.