Clothes Shopping in Beijing

Wherever you move, clothes shopping will ultimately be on your list of things to do, either as a need or just for fun. In Beijing, you will have many choices for buying clothes. You can easily find foreign brands in Beijing. You just have to learn about, shopping places, sales, sizes, and bargaining. 

Shop from your Favorite Brand store

As a foreigner, you can easily find your brands and style in Beijing. There are nearly all big international brands’ stores. GAP, Zara, Mango, Promod, Vero Moda, Guess, Uniqlo, and many other international brands are available in big shopping centers all over in Beijing. So, you can easily get your style and favorite brand. You can find your brand store location online. 

Departmental stores in the city center also have many brands. However, the prices of international brands chain stores may often higher than in Europe or the US. 

Explore Chinese Brands

China also has its own clothing brands that can be easily found all over in Beijing. You will find many Chinese labels cheap clothes in street shops or small markets. There are many shopping centers where you can get all clothes styling at a very low price. You just have to learn about Chinese designers. 

Sports and the great Outdoors brands 

Chinese people tend to buy sports and outdoor clothing. There is a great selection of sports clothing in China. In Beijing, you can easily find different foreign sports brands like Adidas and Nike. China also has sports brands like Li-Ning. You will have a great variety of sport and outdoor clothing both in domestic and foreign brands. The quality of Chinese sports brands seems as good as foreign brands. 

Buying Cheap Clothes

There are many cheap markets in China, such as the zoo market, street markets, and outdoor small stores. In China markets you can easily find clothes at low prices, however, sometimes you have to bargain to get a low price.  

Quality and style may not be so good, brand labels could be fake, and you may not find a larger size. The domestic stores may not have a fitting room to try on the clothes. 

Finding your Size

You can use the international size charts to find your cloth size. Usually finding size in international brand stores is not a problem. While sometimes your sizes are not easily available. 

You may not find larger sizes in Chinese and Asian brands. The XL and larger sizes are not often available in China, even if some clothes are labeled as large, it may be shortened and smaller for you. So you should not rely on size labels, you should try it on. 

Bargaining in China

Bargaining for the prices is normal in markets and often essential. The prices are usually quite overstated in the markets which are located nearby expat residence. However, at cheap markets bargaining on clothing is often not possible. 

In local Chinese shops and department stores, you can ask for a discount on the clothing items you want to buy. Sometimes you will get a big discount on your request. However, in some bigger department stores and shopping centers, extra discounts are not available. 

Sale Items

You can find many clothing stores offering a discount on specific items labeled for sale. The discounted prices are often labeled on the price tags, however, if you don’t find the price, you can ask the salesman. You may find a sale sign hanging outside the stores. The stores may offer you a 15% to 30% discount.

Get used to Salesperson 

In bigger stores, you may find a salesperson standing right behind you and following you around in the store. You may feel like you are under misgiving of planning to take away some shop items. You should feel easy, they following you just to help you and close by you to get any commission when you end up your shopping. 

Chinese people are used to this practice and they don’t bother about it, while foreigners like a bit space while shopping. If you feel uncomfortable you can ask the salesperson to give you some space. You can also ignore them and continue your shopping.