Shopping in Taipei

Before I moved here and after all my previous visits, I knew that there was not much for me to shop in terms of clothing for a shopaholic like me. I was both right and wrong.

In Taipei, you can actually find all kinds of shopping. What kinds of shopping can you anticipate then? You can find lots of sports fashion, outdoor activity stuff, shoes, toys, bags, cosmetics, watches, sweets, stationary, etc.
Something you will find are cheaper than elsewhere are bikes, often made in Taiwan.
Foldable bikes are very popular in Taiwan and I bought one online.

Where can you go shopping then?
There are big department stores like Shinkong Mitsukoshi, Breeze, Sogo and Eslite. We live just next to Qsquare Mall, which is a quite big mall.
The mall in Taipei 101 is very high end, so we normally don't go there. The shopping areas I can recommend are Ximenting, Zhongshan, Zhongxiao East Rd and Xinyi.
I have been to Wufenpu, but I wouldn't recommend this wholesale area unless you are a looking for low quality, "use-and-throw" kind of clothes.

You can also find night markets like Shilin and Raohe. Other night markets can be considered to focus more on food. Another kind of shopping opportunity you can find are the underground markets. They are very centralized around Taipei Main Station. Don't expect to find anything fancy in the night markets or underground markets. Things are instead very local and cheap.

Speaking about online shopping, it is also very widespread here in Taiwan. There are lots of homepages selling basically everything. It is quite convenient that you can pay in the convenient stores if you don't dare to use your credit card online.

Don't expect to find big outlet villages like the ones in the US. There is a small outlet department store called Leeco, but it is far from what you can expect from something called outlet.
We found two outlet stores, one near Sogo and one in Zhongxiao Dunhua. They sell some kind of defected or no-good items, often quite smelly. You can actually find some bargains there sometimes.
You can also find some short-term sales, so called 特賣會 (temaihui),  where they want to clean out some stocks of old season shoes, bags, cloths in some locales that are kept for these kind of purposes.
I have seen some "temaihui" sales where they sold very high end brands and the queue was stretching super long outside from morning to late afternoon. I wonder why they don't have to work...

In Taiwan, there is a normally Anniversary Sales in the department stores where some banks are be involved. You simply can get discount by using the banks' credit cards. Except for some discount (10-20%), the deal is normally: "Buy 5000NTD and receive a 500NTD voucher for your next purchase". This activity will move around the chain stores around Taipei or even nation wide. You will see that the stores will be overcrowded with shopping crazy people.

When it comes to discount, it is opposite to our Western way of thinking because the Chinese way of giving discount is called 打折 (dazhe). Instead of saying "It is 20% discount", they turn it around and say "You pay 80% of the price" instead. I get confused every time I see the sign inside a store.

When there is sales and they say "From 8 折", it means you will get maximum 20% off.
In Western countries, it would be "Sales starts from 20% off" or "At least 20% off". This is also something that conflicts with what we are used to.

Sometimes there are big sales like 50% off, but I find it quite unusual. I guess 10-30% is what they normally can give as a discount when sales seasons come.

Something about casual clothing then. Uniqlo has been established here for some years. Just recently, their sister company GU has also opened its first stores in Taipei. Swedish giant H&M will open here soon. Gap and Zara are already here. I brand I like is Global Work, a Japanese chain.
I would like to mention one brand that the Taiwanese are crazy about: Roots.
This is a Canadian brand and is actually not famous in Europe at all. I have never heard of it before, so I found it very strange that Taiwanese people go crazy when there is sales from this brand. Prices are actually surprisingly high and the design is just average. However, they buy it like it is some fancy brand.

When it comes to shopping high end brands, you can expect to find all the classic high end brands in the upper class department stores. Asian people seek for status, so having a brand name bag, watch, shoes and cloths is still something very important to them.

If you prefer buying used high end items instead, you can also find lots of stores in Taipei selling second hand items.

I would also like to mention that it is not common to find counterfeit products here in Taiwan. It is definitely not like Thailand and China.

What I like about Taiwan are all the convenient stores open 24h. Even Watsons selling cosmetics are open 24h.

What is different here compared to shopping in Bangkok, which I used to like, is that Taiwan has seasons. Not four, but at least two seasons. It means that you can buy jackets, sweaters and boots here.

We have enjoyed shopping here. My wife went crazy about shopping sports clothes and so did I. It's the easiest thing to find here. When it comes to casual apparel, I couldn't find anything worth buying except for Abercrombie & Fitch, which are imported and sold in lots of local stores scattered around the city. Well, I find the Taiwanese brand A Pirate Store quite OK sometimes.
I have instead enjoyed shopping cheaply at the Japanese low price chain Daiso. Everything, except for snacks, costs just 39NTD. There are local variants of low price chains also, but I find Daiso more fun and colorful.
My wife did some nice shopping here. She also thinks that shoes designed and made in Taiwan are quite comfortable at reasonable prices.

Don't forget, as a tourist, you can enjoy a 5% VAT refund (min purchase 3000NTD) if you bring your passport along with you. However, this is mostly just valid in the department stores.