Terms of service

1. What Lantern is

Lantern is an independent discovery and comparison platform for products listed on Chinese marketplaces, principally Taobao, Tmall and 1688. The catalogue is built from member submissions: people find a listing, write it up, and it publishes here when they send it. We host those submissions, review them against the content policy after they are published and remove what breaks it, collect community evidence such as reviews and quality-control photographs, and estimate what an order would cost through each of the 8 purchasing agents we track. Then we send you somewhere else to buy it.

Lantern is not the author of product listings. We do not review submissions before they appear, we do not verify them, and we do not vouch for any product shown on this site. Section 7 sets out what that means in practice.

Lantern holds no inventory, takes no payment, ships nothing, imports nothing and is not a party to your purchase. We are not owned by, operated by or exclusive to any purchasing agent, and we are not affiliated with Alibaba Group, Taobao, Tmall or 1688. Our commercial relationships are set out in full in the affiliate disclosure.

2. Eligibility, accounts and acceptance

By using Lantern you accept these terms, our privacy policy and our content policy, which is incorporated into this agreement by reference. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

You must be at least 16 years old. If you use Lantern on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that organisation. You must not use Lantern if you are subject to sanctions that would make providing the service to you unlawful, or if applicable law in your country prohibits importing the categories of goods indexed here.

No account is needed to browse, search or save. Submitting products, reviews or photographs requires an account. You are responsible for keeping your credentials to yourself, for the accuracy of what you enter, and for everything done through your account. Tell us at trust@lantern-finds.com if you believe someone else has used it.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Scrape, crawl at a rate that degrades the service, bulk-download the catalogue, or use automated means to extract data beyond what a normal browser requests. Our published feeds and structured data exist so that you do not need to.
• Republish the catalogue, in whole or in substantial part, as a competing index, dataset or spreadsheet.
• Interfere with the service: probing, load testing, denial of service, bypassing rate limits, circumventing technical restrictions, or reverse engineering to build a substitute.
• Introduce malware, or use Lantern to distribute links to malicious or deceptive destinations.
• Impersonate another person, a Lantern staff member, a purchasing agent, a marketplace or a seller.
• Manipulate the platform's signals: vote brigading, fake reviews, artificially inflating saves or views, coordinated submission of the same seller, or paying anyone to do so.
• Use Lantern to source counterfeit goods, to advertise a replica business, or to route people to a replica index. This is enforced strictly; see the content policy.
• Harass, threaten, dox or discriminate against anyone, including sellers and agent staff.
• Use the service in breach of export controls, sanctions, customs law or the law of your own country.

Reasonable, well-behaved automated access for research or accessibility is welcome. Write to legal@lantern-finds.com and describe what you need rather than guessing at our tolerance.

4. Contributions and content rules

“Contributions” means anything you submit: product submissions, reviews, ratings, photographs, haul write-ups, collections, boards, comments, reports and messages to us. You are responsible for your contributions and you warrant that:

• You own them or have the rights necessary to publish them here, including the rights in any photograph you upload.
• They are accurate to the best of your knowledge, and any review reflects genuine experience with the product. You have not been paid, discounted or otherwise incentivised for a review without saying so in the review.
• They do not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark, design right, privacy or publicity rights.
• They do not breach the content policy.
• They contain no personal data about other people that you are not entitled to publish, including addresses and names visible on parcel labels.

We may edit contributions for length, clarity, formatting and factual correction; we may decline to publish; and we may remove anything at any time. We are not obliged to review contributions before publication, and choosing to moderate some content does not make us responsible for all of it.

5. Your licence to us

You keep ownership of your contributions. You grant Lantern a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt, reformat, translate, publish, publicly display and distribute your contributions for the purposes of operating, improving and promoting the service, including in editorial round-ups, social posts and search-engine previews. This licence lasts as long as the contribution is published, and survives afterwards only to the limited extent needed for backups, legal records and copies already distributed.

You grant other users of Lantern the right to view your contributions through the service and to link to them. Nothing here lets anyone else resell your photographs.

Where the law recognises moral rights, you agree that we may display your contribution with the display name you chose, or without attribution where the format makes attribution impractical. We will honour a reasonable request for attribution or removal; see the privacy policy for how to ask.

If you send us an idea or feature suggestion, we may use it without obligation or compensation. Do not send us anything you consider confidential.

6. Lantern is an index, not a seller

This is the clause most likely to matter to you, so it is stated bluntly.

• Lantern does not sell any product shown on this site.
• Lantern is not the seller, merchant of record, importer of record, exporter, freight forwarder, consolidator, purchasing agent or payment processor for your order.
• Your contract of sale is with the marketplace seller. Your service contract is with the purchasing agent you choose. Any dispute about the item, its condition, its shipment, its customs treatment or a refund is between you and them.
• Lantern cannot cancel your order, change your address, release a parcel, escalate a QC complaint or issue a refund, because Lantern has no access to any of it.
• Duties, import VAT, customs charges and any prohibition on importing a particular good into your country are your responsibility. We flag what we know; we cannot know your local rules.

Anyone contacting you and claiming to take payment on Lantern's behalf is committing fraud. Lantern has no checkout and will never ask for card details, marketplace credentials or identity documents. Report it to trust@lantern-finds.com.

7. Lantern hosts user submissions

Product pages on Lantern are member submissions, and the same is true of reviews, photographs, hauls and collections. The person who submitted the content is responsible for it, under the warranties in section 4. Lantern is a hosting service for that content: we store it, display it, and remove or disable access to it on a valid notice through the process in copyright and trademark, or where it breaches the content policy or the law.

Submissions are published when they are filed. Lantern does not review a submission before it appears, and nothing on this site should be read as a representation that a page has been checked by us. Moderators read published pages afterwards and remove what breaches the content policy, whether they find it themselves or somebody reports it.

Where a page has been reviewed and left up, that means one thing only: a person looked at it against the content policy and found no reason to remove it. It is not verification and not endorsement. It does not mean Lantern has inspected the product, confirmed the listing, checked the price or vouched for the seller, and it does not make the submission Lantern's own statement.

8. Prices, estimates and availability

Prices shown are in Chinese yuan as observed at the time of indexing. Marketplace prices change constantly, sellers run promotions, variants cost different amounts and listings disappear. Converted currency figures are illustrative and use a fixed reference rate, not a live one.

Agent totals on this site are estimates, calculated by Lantern from each agent's published fee structure and our own per-region freight table, most recently verified on 1 Aug 2026. 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.

Nothing on Lantern is an offer capable of acceptance, a quotation, or a guarantee that a listing exists, is in stock, will ship to your country or will arrive in the estimated window.

9. Agents, marketplaces and other third parties

Lantern links to independent businesses, and we form editorial views about them. Reliability, QC, app and support are scored by Lantern from each agent's published fee structure, its documented policies and hands-on checks of the service. They are our editorial assessment, not aggregated user reviews: Lantern collects no agent ratings from members. None of it is an audit, and a score can be out of date the day after we publish it.

We do not control any third party's conduct, pricing, terms, privacy practices, warehouse handling or solvency. We are not responsible for their acts or omissions, and recommending an agent is not a warranty of performance. If an agent behaves badly, tell us: it changes what we publish. But your claim lies against them.

The marketplaces and purchasing agents Lantern links to are independent companies with their own terms, and you use them at your own risk.

10. No warranty

Lantern is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that the catalogue is complete or accurate, that estimates will match what you are charged, or that community content is truthful.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by this section.

11. Limitation of liability and release

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Lantern and the people who work on it will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, nor for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, data or anticipated savings, arising out of or in connection with your use of the service, including any loss connected with an order you placed with a marketplace seller or purchasing agent after finding it here.

Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you have paid Lantern in the twelve months before the claim arose, which for almost every user is zero because Lantern is free, and (b) EUR 100.

Release. To the fullest extent permitted by law, you release Lantern and the people who work on it from all claims, demands and damages of every kind, known or unknown, arising out of or connected with a dispute between you and a marketplace seller, a marketplace, a purchasing agent or another user.

These limits apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose, and they survive termination. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, in which case the limitation applies to the maximum extent that jurisdiction permits.

12. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Lantern and its operators, staff and contractors against claims, liabilities, damages, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from (a) your contributions, (b) your breach of these terms or the content policy, (c) your infringement of a third party's rights, or (d) your use of the service in breach of applicable law, including customs, sanctions and export controls. We will notify you of any such claim and may take control of its defence, and you agree not to settle in a way that imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

13. Our intellectual property

The Lantern name, logo, editorial writing, category taxonomy, scoring methodology, guide structure, generated product imagery, interface design and the compilation of the catalogue are ours or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright, database and trademark law. You may link to Lantern freely and quote short extracts with attribution. You may not copy the catalogue as a dataset, mirror the site, or use our name or marks in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation.

Third-party names, marks and listing titles appear for identification and reference only. They belong to their owners. If you are a rights holder, the notice-and-takedown process is in copyright and trademark.

14. Suspension and termination

You may stop using Lantern at any time. If you have an account, you can ask us to delete it by writing to privacy@lantern-finds.com; what happens to contributions you published is governed by section 5 and the privacy policy. We may suspend or delete your account, restrict your access, and remove your contributions, where you breach these terms or the content policy, where we are required to by law, or where continued access presents a security or integrity risk to the platform.

Except where the breach is serious (counterfeit promotion, fraud, coordinated manipulation, malware), we will normally warn first and explain what needs to change. The enforcement ladder and the appeal route are described in the content policy. Sections 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 and 17 survive termination.

15. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of [Governing law jurisdiction, to be completed on incorporation], without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts of [Courts of competent jurisdiction] have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident in the EEA, the EU or the UK, nothing here deprives you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence, or of your right to bring proceedings in your local courts.

Before starting formal proceedings, please write to legal@lantern-finds.com with a description of the dispute. Most things that look like a legal problem turn out to be a moderation decision we can explain or reverse within a week. Details of the legal entity behind Lantern and any designated dispute-resolution body are in the imprint.

16. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms as the platform changes or the law does. The effective date and version at the top of this page always reflect the current text. For material changes we will publish the new version at least 30 days before it takes effect and describe what changed. Continuing to use Lantern after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you do not, stop using the service.

17. General

• Entire agreement. These terms, the privacy policy, the content policy and the affiliate disclosure are the whole agreement between us about the service.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a right on one occasion does not waive it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our consent. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a reorganisation or sale of the business, on notice.
• Notices. We give notice by publishing on this site; you give notice by writing to legal@lantern-finds.com.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failure caused by events outside its reasonable control.
• No agency. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency, employment or joint venture between us.
• Language. The English text is authoritative; any translation is for convenience.