Who operates Lantern

Not affiliated with Alibaba Group

Lantern is an independent service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, operated by or otherwise connected to Alibaba Group Holding Limited or any of its subsidiaries, including Taobao Marketplace, Tmall and 1688.com.

Those names, and the names of the purchasing agents, marketplaces, sellers and brands referred to across this site, are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used for identification and reference only. Nothing on Lantern should be read as a claim of partnership, authorisation or official status. Where Lantern describes a marketplace or an agent, that description is our own editorial assessment and not a statement issued or approved by the company concerned.

Lantern is equally independent of every purchasing agent it compares. Some of them pay a referral fee, which is published in full (including the rates and the single line of code where it applies) in the affiliate disclosure.

What this service does

Lantern hosts member submissions about products listed on third-party marketplaces, screens them against its content policy, and estimates what an order would cost through independent purchasing agents. It is an information service. Lantern sells nothing, holds no stock, takes no payment, ships nothing and is not the seller, merchant of record, importer of record or agent for any transaction. Contracts of sale are formed between you and a marketplace seller; service contracts are formed between you and the purchasing agent you choose. All cost totals shown on this site are estimates and are labelled as such wherever they appear.

Because Lantern is not a trader in goods, no consumer right of withdrawal, warranty claim or refund obligation in respect of a purchase arises against Lantern. Those rights lie against the seller or the agent, under the law that governs your contract with them. The full picture is in the terms of service.

Dispute resolution

If you have a complaint about Lantern itself (a moderation decision, an inaccurate product page, a data request, an editorial judgement), write to legal@lantern-finds.com. We answer every complaint, normally within five working days, and we say what we are going to do about it.

• Internal complaint handling. Moderation and enforcement decisions have a documented appeal route with an independent reviewer and a ten-working-day target, set out in the content policy.
• Alternative dispute resolution. [Designated ADR body, if any]. We are not currently obliged to participate in alternative dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board, and we do not undertake to do so. The European Commission's online dispute resolution platform ceased operation in July 2025 and is no longer available as a route.
• Out-of-court dispute settlement under the Digital Services Act. Where the DSA applies, recipients of the service may bring a dispute about a content-moderation decision before a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body in their member state, in addition to the internal appeal above and without prejudice to the right to go to court.
• Consumer advice. Consumers in the EU can get free guidance from their national European Consumer Centre; consumers in the UK from Citizens Advice.
• Data protection. Complaints about how we handle personal data can go to your national supervisory authority. See the privacy policy.
• Courts. The governing law and jurisdiction clause is section 15 of the terms of service. Mandatory consumer protections in your country of residence are unaffected by it.

Liability for content and links

Editorial content on Lantern is produced with care, and we correct errors when they are pointed out. Write to hello@lantern-finds.com and the correction is usually live the same week. We accept no liability for the accuracy, completeness or currency of listing data originating from third-party marketplaces, or of fee structures published by purchasing agents.

Lantern links to external websites over whose content we have no control. At the time of linking, no unlawful content was apparent. We do not monitor linked pages on an ongoing basis without a specific indication of a legal violation, and we remove links promptly when we become aware of one. Notices about a link should go to legal@lantern-finds.com.

User-generated content (product submissions and their descriptions, reviews, photographs, hauls and collections) expresses the view of the person who posted it, not of Lantern, and Lantern does not adopt it as its own. As a hosting provider, Lantern has no general obligation to monitor the information its users submit; it removes or disables access to content promptly on obtaining knowledge of illegality, in line with Article 6 of the EU Digital Services Act and equivalent national provisions. The moderation process, and the routes for reporting content, are described in the content policy and copyright and trademark.

Accessibility and corrections

Lantern is built to work with a keyboard, a screen reader, a reduced-motion preference and a dark colour scheme. If something on this site is unusable for you, that is a defect and we want the report: hello@lantern-finds.com. Include the page and what happened, and we will tell you when it is fixed.