mxleader on 5/4/2011 at 05:58
I always do a search for "buy it now" auctions for what I am looking for. If you are patient someone will post an item below the market value just to get rid of it or they don't really know the value (and how to find the value) so you can get good deals that way. I've bought a number of things that way and turned right around and put it back on a auction and made money off of people who get into bidding wars.
Nameless Voice on 5/4/2011 at 09:04
What happened to me was I bought a little adapter cable for my headphones (they have an odd recessed connection socket). I bought the cable from the UK and it was physically impossible to put the cable int other adapter - the slot wasn't deep enough and I could only get one-channel sound. So I complained, the guy sent me a second one... and it still didn't work. So I just gave up and bought one from a shop in Hong Kong, and haven't had any trouble with that since.
I also bought a long gold-plated audio cable - I didn't really care about the gold plating, just wanted a 2m cable - and the guy sent me a non-gold-plated one, again this was from a shop in the UK IIRC. I complained again and they sent me the right cable, at least. I think. It's been a while, I can't quite remember.
Either way, I've decided it's a good idea not to buy audio cables from eBayers in the UK.
I've found the postage time from Hong Kong to be fairly good, considering.
Hewer on 5/4/2011 at 16:36
Buy it now is the way to go. I hate hassling with bidding. If I do bid, I will wait until the last few hours and put up the most I'm willing to pay (keeping shipping costs in mind), then let it go and see if I get the "you won" email.
If I really want the item I'll check back a few minutes before it ends an maybe bump up my bid a little bit (only once) to see if somebody has just edged me out, but I've learned to just let things go if I need to. Never be desperate or competitive with money.
Matthew on 5/4/2011 at 19:55
If you want to be totally heartless, you can always use a sniper program. I used one for a while and it seemed to work quite well.
Nicker on 5/4/2011 at 20:49
Yeah I got tired of getting items sniped at the last second and my best manual tactics for bidding in the dying seconds was never fast enough. So I went dirty with a sniping website. I used Auction Sniper, which lets you have some free trial uses and charges fairly reasonably for additional items. None of these services are 100% effective but they are way better than me at my fastest.
I've had mixed experiences with both small time and professional sellers. The satisfaction ratings are helpful but the worst experience I had was with a pro-seller who padded his stats with low-priced junk items so he could rip people on the big ticket ones and hide behind his 99.9% rating. On the other hand I got a cell phone battery from Kong Kong, which worked but was less than par. I complained about it in an email, expecting to be ignored (so I didn't even specify a free replacement as a remedy). That day I got a friendly reply and within two weeks a fresh replacement arrived, no fuss not charge.
Caveat emptor.
dj_ivocha on 6/4/2011 at 19:03
Quote Posted by catbarf
I once bought a 16GB flash drive on which only 8GB worked. The rest would inevitably be corrupted and inaccessible. It was a pain in the ass.
It's because the drive only HAD 8GB of flash memory. There've been quite a few such cases here in Germany too - you buy some flash drive from a seemingly reputable (German) Ebay seller or even a normal online shop, only to have your data corrupted if it used up more than half of the reported capacity. What the manufacturers of these fakes do is put X GB of flash chips in the drive, but tweak the flash controller to think there's actually 2X GB available. So if you try to copy 1.5 GB on your 2 GB drive, the first 1 GB will be copied just fine while the rest will be sent to the flash memory nirvana. And the worst thing is that because the controller itself thinks it has more memory available, it doesn't notify you of the problem, so you don't even notice it until you try to read the stuff back.
catbarf on 7/4/2011 at 00:34
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
It's because the drive only HAD 8GB of flash memory. There've been quite a few such cases here in Germany too - you buy some flash drive from a seemingly reputable (German) Ebay seller or even a normal online shop, only to have your data corrupted if it used up more than half of the reported capacity. What the manufacturers of these fakes do is put X GB of flash chips in the drive, but tweak the flash controller to think there's actually 2X GB available. So if you try to copy 1.5 GB on your 2 GB drive, the first 1 GB will be copied just fine while the rest will be sent to the flash memory nirvana. And the worst thing is that because the controller itself thinks it has more memory available, it doesn't notify you of the problem, so you don't even notice it until you try to read the stuff back.
Thanks for the explanation, that matches what I experienced perfectly. That's a big part of why I don't buy computer parts and other complex electronics from China anymore- just too much hazard and substandard product.
