How Lantern makes money

The whole thing in five lines

1. 6 of the 8 purchasing agents on Lantern have agreed to pay us a referral fee when someone arrives through our link and places an order. The agreed rates run from 4% to 6%.
2. CSSBuy and Basetao pay us nothing, appear everywhere the others do, and regularly win the recommendation.
3. The fee comes out of the agent's own service revenue. You pay exactly the same either way.
4. Ranking is computed from cost, reliability, QC quality, regional route strength and support quality. The affiliate rate has a weight of zero.
5. It is consulted in one place only: to order two options whose score and total cost are already identical. That is the entire influence money has on this site.

Who has agreed to pay us, and how much

Rates below are the commission share we receive on the agent's service revenue for a referred order, as agreed and configured on 1 Aug 2026. They are not a share of your item price and not a markup added to your total. An order placed through a link that carries no referral code earns us nothing at all, and until each link format has been verified that is the normal case here rather than the exception.

Who has no referral relationship

CSSBuy and Basetao have no referral relationship with Lantern. They are quoted on every product page, appear in every comparison, are eligible for every badge including best value, and are recommended whenever the numbers say so.

• CSSBuy: veteran operator, lean fees, plain interface. Flat handling fee ¥5, freight multiplier ×0.96, reliability 4.4/5. See the full profile.
• Basetao: wholesale-friendly, strong on 1688 bulk orders. Flat handling fee ¥9, freight multiplier ×0.94, reliability 4.2/5. See the full profile.

This is the load-bearing part of the disclosure. A comparison site that only lists the companies paying it is an advertisement with a table in it. Including agents that will never send us a cent is what makes the ranking mean anything, and it is the reason we would rather publish a page like this than a line of small print in a footer.

How ranking actually works

Every product page prices your order through each agent that supports the marketplace the listing is on: item cost, domestic seller-to-warehouse shipping, service fee, flat handling fee, and international freight on chargeable weight to your region. Those totals then feed a score out of 100 built from five terms, weighted as follows.

Two adjustments sit on top. Agents with strong published routes to your selected region get a small bonus, because a well-served route is genuinely faster and cheaper. And for fragile categories (ceramics, resin figures, collectibles), QC quality is weighted up sharply, because a cheap parcel that arrives in pieces is not cheap. Both adjustments are visible in the rationale line under each quote.

Cost dominates at 55 points because that is what people actually optimise, but it is deliberately not 100: the cheapest agent is often not the right answer for a ¥900 ceramic lamp, and a comparison tool that pretended otherwise would be lying by omission.

The tie-break rule, in full

Quotes are sorted by score, descending. Where two agents have the same score, the cheaper total wins. Where the score and the total are both identical, the agent with the higher referral rate is listed first. That third comparison is the only line of code on Lantern where our revenue affects what you see, and this is what it says:

quotes.sort((a, b) => {
  if (b.score !== a.score) return b.score - a.score;
  if (a.totalCNY !== b.totalCNY) return a.totalCNY - b.totalCNY;
  // Only ever a tie-break, and disclosed as such.
  return b.agent.affiliateRate - a.agent.affiliateRate;
});

In practice this fires almost never: totals are computed to the yuan and two agents with different fee structures rarely land on the same number. We could have used alphabetical order instead and lost nothing but the fee. We kept it, and we are telling you it is there, because a disclosure that only mentions the flattering parts is not a disclosure.

Estimates are estimates

Every total on Lantern is an estimate and is labelled as one wherever it appears. In full:

Totals are estimates calculated by Lantern from each agent's published fee structure and our own per-region freight table. Actual charges depend on final weight, dimensions, declared value, route and customs. Always confirm in the agent's own cart before paying.

The fee structures behind the estimates are editorial configuration maintained by us, last verified on 1 Aug 2026, not a live rate feed from each agent. Freight is modelled on chargeable weight, which is the greater of actual and volumetric weight, so light bulky items cost more than their mass suggests. Currency conversions use a fixed reference rate for illustration and will not match your card's rate on the day.

If a total on Lantern is materially wrong, that is a bug and we want to hear about it: legal@lantern-finds.com. Corrections to rate configuration are the most useful message we receive.

What an outbound link contains

All outbound traffic to purchasing agents passes through a single redirect on our side, so that disclosure and link handling live in one place rather than being sprinkled across the site. The redirect builds a destination containing the marketplace URL of the listing, the marketplace it came from, and, for agents with a referral relationship, a referral identifier plus standard campaign parameters naming Lantern as the source.

That is what the redirect does once a code is in place. Until an agent's link format has been verified and its code configured, there is no code to append and you are sent to the agent with the listing URL and nothing else. One other case is worth naming: where the member who submitted a find has set their own referral code for that agent, the link carries theirs instead of ours and the fee goes to them.

Those parameters identify us. They contain no visitor identifier, no profile data and nothing derived from your browsing; see the privacy policy for the detail. Affiliate links are marked rel="nofollow sponsored" in the markup, which is both the honest signal to search engines and a requirement of most advertising standards regimes.

Links to agents without a referral relationship carry no referral parameters at all, and are otherwise indistinguishable in the interface.

What is not for sale

• Catalogue inclusion. No seller, brand or agent can pay to be indexed, and none has.
• Ranking position. Not for product ranking, agent ranking, search results, category ordering or the feed.
• Editorial verdicts. Guides, editor's picks and the verified marker are editorial decisions. There is no sponsored slot inside a guide. The verified marker records that the link, listing and seller checked out at the time of review; it is not a guarantee of the product, and Lantern does not vouch for any product on this site.
• Ratings and scores. Reliability, QC, app and support scores are Lantern's own editorial assessment, worked out from each agent's published fee structure, its documented policies and hands-on checks of the service. They are not user reviews and are never presented as any: Lantern collects no agent ratings from members. No agent sees a score before publication or can have one changed by asking.
• Negative coverage removal. An agent cannot buy its way out of a documented problem. If support collapses in peak season, that goes on the profile.
• Your data. Not sold, not shared for advertising, not used to build an audience segment.

If Lantern ever runs advertising, it will be labelled as advertising on the page where it appears, separated from editorial content, and excluded from the ranking model. We have no plans to.

How to audit this yourself

A disclosure you cannot check is a promise. Three things you can verify in a few minutes:

1. Open any product page and read the agent comparison. Every quote shows its component costs and a rationale line explaining its position. Check that the ordering follows cost, reliability and QC rather than the rates in the table above.
2. Find a product where CSSBuy or Basetao is recommended over the agents that would pay us. There are many; the low freight multipliers in the table are why.
3. Change your shipping region on a product page and watch the ordering change. If money were driving it, the winner would not move when the route does.

Then read the full agent comparison, which lays out fees, storage windows, marketplace coverage and regional strengths side by side, and the terms of service for what we do and do not warrant about any of them.