OPEN
Who publishes this, what it earns, and what it cannot do
This site is not the agent, not a shop and not a judge of anybody goods. It is a dated reading of the documents OrientDig publishes, arranged in the order the decisions reach you. Here is exactly how it is made and paid for.
We are an OrientDig partner and earn a referral fee on orders placed through our links. Nothing here is written or approved by them.
FACT
Where this site sits, which is outside the picture
OrientDig draws its own service as a short strip: you choose something, they buy it for you. That strip is accurate, and the useful thing about it is what it leaves out. This site is not in it.
Everything to the right of that arrow belongs to the agent: the purchase, the warehouse, the photographs, the parcel, the money. We do none of it. We hold nothing, ship nothing, and never see your payment details, your address or your order.
What sits to the left of it is reading. OrientDig publishes a considerable amount about how all this works, spread across a help centre, a disclaimers page, a returns page, a prohibited items statement, a standards page and several tutorials. It is organised by topic, which is sensible for a reference and unhelpful when you are halfway through an order. This site reads the same documents and rearranges them into the order the decisions actually arrive, which is the only thing it does.
LOCKED
What we do, and what we are structurally unable to do
The second column is the more important one, and it is not modesty. Knowing which questions this site cannot answer saves you from asking them here and losing a day.
What this site is
A reading of OrientDig published pages, re-ordered into the sequence an order actually happens in, with the source page named and the date it was read printed under every section.
A catalogue of product links you can browse by category, pointing at listings that other shoppers have already ordered, so that finding something is not an exercise in scrolling chat logs.
An explicit position on what a quality photograph can and cannot settle, which is the single most over-promised thing in this market.
What it is not, and cannot become
Not the agent. We cannot look up your order, chase your seller, release your parcel, alter a declaration, speed up an inspection or give you a refund. Those belong to OrientDig and the routes to them are on the help page.
Not a seller. Nothing on this site is for sale, no listing behind a link is guaranteed to still exist, and we hold no stock of anything.
Not an authority on any item. We have no more information about whether a particular thing is well made than you do, and a site that claims otherwise is claiming something nobody in this chain has ever been in a position to verify.
FACT
The method, in full
How a page here gets written
The method is unglamorous and it is the whole reason to prefer this to a forum thread. Five rules, applied to every page on the site.
Official documents only, quoted with a date
Every rule, window, threshold and exclusion on this site comes from a page OrientDig publishes. The page is named, the date it was opened is printed, and the link to the original sits in the same grey line so you can check it rather than trust us. Where they and we disagree, they are right.
No invented numbers, anywhere
We do not quote prices, fees, exchange rates, delivery times, stock levels or discounts of our own. Where an amount appears in a screenshot, it is one of OrientDig own tutorial examples and the caption says so. A number without a source is the easiest thing in the world to write and the hardest thing for a reader to check.
Screenshots are official, and opened before they are described
Every image here is a screen from the official site, several of them their own tutorial captures with the red arrows they drew on them. Each one was opened and looked at before its description was written, which is why the descriptions mention the cells that are blurred out rather than pretending to read them.
Contradictions get shown, not smoothed
Where two official pages say different things, both are quoted and neither is averaged into a figure that appears nowhere. The updates page lists the open ones.
The page that tells you to go elsewhere stays in
Why use this site ends with four situations where you should use a different service entirely. A site earning a referral fee that never says that is not being careful with you.
OPEN
Who publishes this, how it is paid for, and how to reach a person
This site is written and maintained by the OrientDig Spreadsheet Order Checklist editorial desk, and it earns a referral fee from OrientDig.
Both halves of that sentence belong in the same size type. We are an OrientDig partner, we earn a fee when readers order through links here, and that is what pays for the research, the hosting and the time. It also gives us an obvious interest in you clicking through, which you should factor in when you read anything here that sounds like an opinion rather than a quote.
The reading instruction that follows is the one worth keeping: trust the parts of this site that name an official page and date the quote, because you can check them against the original in about thirty seconds and the link is right there. Be more sceptical of everything else, including this paragraph.
For a correction, a stale quote, a link that no longer opens or a page that reads wrong, write to [email protected]. We answer, we say when we were wrong, and we put the date of the fix on the page. What we cannot do is anything at all about your order, which is on the help page.