You and me are aiding Chinese exporters via postage costs subsidy

In what way?

Marketplace seems to make it hard to distinguish what's coming from China and what's local. You need to place a close eye on the delivery date, and even then you might end up with something shipped from China that you may have to pay VAT on.

On ebay you can filter by origin country easily. It doesn't stop lying, cheating and drop-shipping (addresses near Heathrow are ones to watch), but it filters out a lot of the Chinese sellers.

Theo

Same thing happens with amazon.

Filtering on eBay country of origin rarely works properly for me. I think Amazon Marketplace is a lot safer and gives much speedier redress.

Then as well as postage, you'd have to sort out all the other things that make UK products uncompetitive price wise with the far east. Rent rates taxes wages and so on.

I don't know how you chose your sellers but I've purchased around 1500 items on Ebay since Apr 2005 and had to use Ebay's resolution service zero times. I've had a few non-delivered items but all have been quickly resolved by the seller. I've had a few completely crap very low value items that I've written off because it wasn't worth the cost in money/time to do anything about them (apart from leaving a negative feedback). I also leave negative feedback if a Chinese seller pretendes to be in the UK and advertised a 2 day estimated delivery.

I am glad you can write off those items which would otherwise be the subject of a dispute and ones which would probably result in an unsatisfactory final outcome and with you out of pocket.

I don't believe you have ordered 1,500 items and had nothing go wrong. Only by throwing away money by not following up swindles because they are too time-consuming, could you have such a record.

I have a very different experience from eBay including one large seller manipulating the returns process to avoid compensation. eBay took that up as an investigation into the seller's wider practises -- but not until it wasted an inordinate amount of my time.

I've had to use ebay's resolution process several times and it doesn't work well. Worse still, If a British customer wants to complain about eBay's complaints resolution process then they have to send snail mail letter to an Irish address. Pass the sick bag.

It doesn't always as I've found on amazon, you buy from Zangbloggs from London, as soon as he receives the order he txt the order to his mate in china who sends them to London where zangbloggs lives and he posts them on.

zangbloggs is not a real name on amazon I hope. :)

Yes, that's the drop-ship method, where Zangbloggs just happens to live in a bonded warehouse in Hounslow. Instead of putting them in a China-Post envelope and putting them on a plane to Heathrow, they put them on the plane and then put them in a Royal Mail envelope at Hounslow. They get to advertise 'UK stock' when it's nothing of the kind.

Another twist to this is where they set the return address to somewhere random - I've had Honiara, Solomon Islands - which is essentially /dev/null for returns.

Theo

How often does this ruse happen? Whenever I have ordered "UK stock" of Chinese-made goods it has arrived a few days later which suggests it was in the UK all along.

Both are common. Often if you look at their recent negative reviews you may get a clue as someone else will have been annoyed with the long delivery times and will have given a warning. Also look at the trading address in the listing and if missing suspect that it may be in the far east.

There are many sellers of cheap Chines item where the goods are actually in the UK and delivery is within 2 or 3 working days. Usually the items will be more expensive than in the listings where the goods will be shipped directly from the far East. However some Chinese sellers have realised this and raised their prices to match the UK sellers to give the impression that they to are also in the UK.

I have purchased many items direct from China at reduced prices and long delivery times and I'm OK with this as long as I'm aware in the first place about where the goods are located. Sometimes I want the items to be delivered faster and choose a UK seller of the same items. If I'm caught out with delivery times 4 to 5 times longer than advertised (after posting the "your package has been shipped" email) or the package arrives with an outer customers declaration I will leave a negative review for the seller.

Touch wood, I've not yet been caught out with additional import duty, VAT or Royal Mail tax collection charges.

\>

We have had this from digikey the product was sent from the USA and on collection from our post room we had to pay £12 in cash before they'd give us the parcel, the courior was waiting at our postroom for the cash.

On 16th july a student asked me to order from ascot city via souringmap on amazon [B078RH2DRN], the expected delievry date was 16th August but we didn't recieve the 8 vibration motors until the 28th august and on that day I also got an email from amazon saying sorry we couldn't deliver on time and gave us the refund of £4.62 the full price of the products, so we have them for free, saving the tax payer £4.62, you may thank us later.

But I was concerned because the students visa or so I was told was this week. So I emailed the student and appologised for the delay, he replied, don't worry I won't be back in college until 10th of september is it alright to collected them then.

If only we could get all our parts for free in exchange for a 2 extra weeks delay we'd go for it. So cheers ascot city :-)

Perfectly normal. I just make sure I'm going to be in, and I have the cash ready. At least it's only the VAT, and no extra charges.

I think Mouser do it differently, but can't quite remember.

But we weren't expecting it, as we'd odered from the UK store.

this is at work where we have a postroom, what if you had one of those amazon mail boxes at a local store. ?

The postroom refused as they don;t really keep cash and I don;t keep much cash on me either but between us we found the £12, but to claim that back from our admin team they wanted a recipt and to know why ....

I wanted to know why it isnt the postrooms problem to deal with this then claim the money back from the department.

Yes they almost seem to be the same store, website very similar.

At least Ebay doesn't make you jump through hoops to avoid their 'prime' service.

It is quite disgraceful how Amazon always defaults to this.

I never believed there was a UK store. Domain name means nothing!

I used to time it very carefully so that I could work at home that day.

I could have made an arrangement with my friend the building manager, but this was easier.

Indeed, but I am sure they are separate.

Buy a reel of ribbon cable, sufficient for all 30 kits, plus 60 connectors and make them up yourself ?.

Most people do that by going to the supermarket at 5PM and buying the yellow label offerings.

What do you need on ebay to 'live' conveniently ?