Our transcribed menus: what was opened, when, and what was left out
Everything this site says about real menus rests on one day of reading. Here is that day, its limits, and how the sample figures elsewhere were made.
Recording the option menus
On 19 October 2026 we opened forty-eight public Weidian listings in our own browser, without signing in to any account, and kept the option data each page loaded: the names of the option groups, every entry in them, and the price and stock figure of every line. The listings came from catalogue shelves across fourteen clothing and accessory categories, chosen mostly from cards that showed a price range, with a few flat-priced cards for contrast.
We kept nothing that identifies a shop or a listing on these pages: no shop names, no item numbers, no links and none of their photos. Where a page here quotes an option name, the words are real; where it shows a price in a figure, the price is invented and labelled as a sample, sometimes shaped to follow a pattern we saw.
Weidian was chosen because its listings open without an account, so the menus could be read exactly as a visitor would see them.
What we counted and what we only noticed
A few things were counted across the whole sample. The range on each card matched the cheapest and dearest line of its listing in all forty-eight cases. No first option group ran past forty entries, and many stopped at exactly forty. Size changed the price inside a colour in one listing only. Round stock figures, the same number repeated, made up half the lines or more in most menus, and a few menus had lines at zero.
Other things were noticed rather than counted, because they turned up in a handful of menus each: what the cheapest line turned out to be, garment words inside colour names, dates written into entries, seller conditions attached to particular lines. The pages that describe those say “in a menu we read” and do not put a share or a percentage on them, because a sample this size cannot support one.
What this sample cannot tell you
Forty-eight listings from one platform on one day is a reading list, not a survey. Every listing came from a catalogue shelf, so it had already been picked by someone as worth showing; ordinary marketplace listings may be built differently. We did not open Taobao, Tmall or 1688 listings for this sample, and menus there have their own habits.
Prices and stock change daily, and a menu read on 19 October 2026 may look different now. The patterns that hold up best over time are structural: that a card shows the ends of a menu, that versions hide in colour lists, that payment lines exist. Those are what the rest of the site is built on.
How the figures and the sample menu are made
Every drawing on this site was made for it: the garments, the option drawers, the cards and the charts. None is a screenshot of a marketplace, a seller photo or an agent screen, with two exceptions. The catalogue shelf cards use crops of real listing photos taken from catalogue shelves, and the CNFans page shows the CNFans wordmark as it rendered on cnfans.com in August 2026.
The sample menu on the home page is invented from end to end. Its structure copies the habits we saw, three groups, a lined version, larger sizes, a pack line, a filler line and two payment lines, but its prices and stock figures are ours, chosen to make each habit visible.
Community threads we did not use
The original menu observations remain a dated sample. The updated ordering guide adds linked Reddit reports about wrong options and warehouse states, clearly separated from those observations. A public menu and a buyer report answer different questions; neither automatically outranks the other in a dispute.
Read the linked community cases for the issue they document, then compare the evidence with your own selected option and order record. No private Discord conversations or authenticated user accounts were available for this review.
Change log
Menu examples retain the date of the original reading. Later editorial corrections are recorded separately; neither date means that the listings or CNFans status are monitored continuously.
- 19 October 2026
- First version. Forty-eight Weidian option menus read; catalogue cards compared; cnfans.com checked at several addresses, all showing the maintenance notice.