Xianyu (闲鱼)

The Xianyu website is goofish.com, the web version that Chinese users look up as 闲鱼网页版. It opens in simplified Chinese and has no language switcher. The service started in 2012 as Taobao Secondhand, Alibaba's second-hand section on Taobao, and became a standalone app under the Xianyu name, Idle Fish in English, in 2014.

So when you look for the Xianyu site you will meet three names for one marketplace: 闲鱼 in Chinese characters, Xianyu in pinyin and Goofish, the brand it uses outside China. Whichever name you search for, the site and the main app around the listings stay in Chinese.

Searching Xianyu from abroad normally means typing Chinese keywords. BuyHub takes over that step: type “Game Boy Color” or “carte Pokémon” and it searches Xianyu in Chinese through your own connection, using the free extension or the BuyHub app. Titles come back translated into your language, and each price in yuan is also shown in your currency.

Set a price range, sort by newest or by price, and save the search as a radar to get an alert when a new listing matches. When something looks right, BuyHub opens the original listing on Xianyu, where the purchase itself takes place.

Xianyu (闲鱼) is the platform that Alibaba built for second-hand trading and one of the largest peer-to-peer marketplaces in China. Outside the country it goes by the name Goofish, at goofish.com. People sell things they no longer use in every imaginable category, and auctions sit alongside direct sales. Authentication checks for products and ratings for users make high-value purchases less of a gamble.

For collectors, Xianyu is a window onto the Chinese market: games and consoles sold in China, imports included, trading cards, figures and all kinds of merchandise, at domestic rather than international prices. Both the site and the listings are in Chinese, prices are in yuan and checkout goes through Alipay, with a verified account. Sellers rarely send parcels abroad, which is why purchases from outside China usually go through a buying agent and a forwarding service.