Buying Chinese stuff on eBay

Sometimes, when I need a cheap item slowly, I order stuff on eBay.

Last week I bought a 20cm phone charging cable. $0.57, shipped.

PayPal charges 3.9% on international sales, that's about 3 cents.

eBay takes 10%, round that to 6 cents.

Okay, the seller has received 48 cents.

They have to ship the item. I did some Google research in to this, and a 20-gram package can ship from Hong Kong for the US equivalent of 20 cents. That's cheaper than I can mail a letter across town, so wow, but whatever. Now the seller is down to 28 cents.

In bulk, small-package shipping envelopes are 8 cents. Now the seller is making 20 cents.

Somebody has to stuff and address the envelope. Labor in China is cheap, let's say that costs a penny. Now we're down to 19 cents.

I went on Alibaba.com. The cheapest you can buy a similar cable, in bulk, is a dime.

If my numbers are even close, the seller makes a dime per sale, net. I get the volume thing, but it makes me shake my head that anybody thinks it's worth it.

There are 7.5 billion people in the world, round up to 8 for easy math. Lets say 25% of the people have devices that need charger cables. 2 billion cables, say all of them have 4 cables, 8 billion cables. Now if you can capture 1% of the market, 80,000,000 cables at .10 each eqauls $8,000,000.

I think it is worth it. That is a lot of Miata. You could even spring for Flying Miata V8 conversion done in the shop.

I had the same thought when buying roll cage tubing. DOM and marked as made in India. The price was $2.14 per foot.

I struggle to make sense of the actual profit when you consider the steel probably came from a cargo ship that was cut down by a guy in shorts and flip-flops on the beach in India somewhere, shipped to the mill, melted down, remixed, turned into ingot, shipped again to the tubing mill, melted, extruded, run through the mandrel machine, cut to length, bundled, trucked to a cargo ship (irony here), sent across the ocean(s), unloaded at the port, trucked to the place I purchased from and then delivered to me. All that before I even marked and cut anything...

Boy that was a long stream of consciousness sentence. I need a cup of coffee now.

Complete disregard for labor, safety, and environmental standards will get you amazingly cheap production costs.

Literally, this morning I bought a 3ft iPhone cord at Walmart for $5.88.

Boy do I feel like a sucker.

Are you sure what you bought was 20cm? That is just under 8". The 3' or 91 cm version is the typical "car cord" size.

Hit or miss on quality. You get what you pay for. Ordered a magnetic charging cable for a smartwatch for my son. First one arrived. It did not work. Contacted seller and despite something of a language barrier, we got both a full refund and a second item. The second item was also defective. Bought a full-price cable locally for many times the cost of the junk. At least the refund was legit.

Not all american jobs have been sent to China, but all americans would be affected by a rise in cost of Chinese goods.

Overall I agree though. How does anyone make any money on some of this stuff?

John Welsh wrote: Are you sure what you bought was 20cm? That is just under 8". The 3' or 91 cm version is the typical "car cord" size.

I hope what I get is 20cm/8". The purpose is to go from my USB "Power Bank" to my phone, all while riding in my cargo pocket, without all the mess a 0.5m cable makes.

I've done some more research into the scuzzy disparity in shipping costs. It makes me not at all happy. It's all about international shipping treaties which were literally designed to make things cheap to ship from China. As if they need the help! Effectively, other countries are subsidizing cheap shipping from China by charging their own countrymen too much.

Here's where it gets really stupid, according to some websites and forums I've looked at. If you are an American seller, and you have 1,000 2 ounce packages to ship to fellow Americans, It is literally cheaper (albeit much slower!) to ship a 125 pound box of all 1,000 packages to Hong Kong and have them shipped BACK to the US, than it is to drop them off at the local PO.

See, now I've gone and made myself mad.

In reply to EvanR:

I suspected as much, but didn't know how to word it properly last night.

Also, being able to buy directly from the manufacturer on an industrial scale helps a lot too. I've noticed no matter which website I shop from, obviously it depends on the type of good be it car parts electronics whatever, there might be 10 "stores" selling the same thing at slightly different prices, but they all share an address, likely the same warehouse. So buying cables by the ton is most likely stupidly cheap compared to even buying a gross of them.

Miata to DSM turbo exhaust manifolds and downpipes come to mind as an example. 6 different sellers on eBay, 6 different prices, exact same pictures, description, and address. The catch with those is they're already stateside, so a shipping container at a time coming in drops most of the cost right away.

When I was looking into setting up a drop shipping service through Amazon like lots of other people do, the prices and logistics just blew my mind.

Duke wrote: Complete disregard for labor, safety, and environmental standards will get you amazingly cheap production costs.

And that right there is why we are not competitive and how our economy is being destroyed. "Oh, just buy this widget from China for a buck instead of ten bucks from the US." China doesn't have the environmental protection laws, labor protection laws, healthcare costs, retirement, taxes for welfare, etc., that a U.S. manufacturer would have. We cannot compete on an even footing with that.

I was talking with a (PRC) Chinese national at work. I asked her about welfare over there. If someone is seriously handicapped, they get such a small amount from the government, even by Chinese standards, that they could not possibly get by on it. If someone is not handicapped, they get nothing at all if they don't work.

stafford1500 wrote: I had the same thought when buying roll cage tubing. DOM and marked as made in India. The price was $2.14 per foot.

Uh, link please :)

Every metal vendor in Daytona thinks they're selling solid gold, and none of them sell proper tube.

In reply to Dr. Hess:

Makes me wonder what kind of deals are going on that it makes sense for Mercedes to build minivans in Alabama for the Chinese market than perhaps make them there. I suspect China can produce quality, just mostly they provide what they're paid for.

Btw, just bought Chinese flash and wireless triggers for my camera. 90% of the quality of Nikon stuff, 20% of the cost.

The industry I used to be in, shipping, is another example. Yes, U.S. sailors were paid more than, say, Chinese or Filipino sailors. U.S. sailors cannot work for a dollar a day. But the salary costs were not why U.S. flag ships were not competitive. It was the regulatory environment attached to U.S. ships that drove them out of business. The U.S. Merchant Marine, for all practical purposes, no longer exists.

JG Pasterjak wrote:

stafford1500 wrote: I had the same thought when buying roll cage tubing. DOM and marked as made in India. The price was $2.14 per foot.

Uh, link please :) Every metal vendor in Daytona thinks they're selling solid gold, and none of them sell proper tube.

JG, I used Stock Car Steel here in the Charlotte area (actually in Mooresville, NC). They do a little volume with the local NASCAR teams, so the price is right. Out in Southern California I used a company named Industrial Metal Supply. Both of these companies are basically warehouses full of metal in most any shape you can imagine.
They have discounted off-cuts from special cut orders that can be used for small projects. They both do mail order, but weight/size is an issue. You have my number if you need something before coming up this way.
There is surely a similar type of place in Orlando or Jacksonville.

How's this for crazy / scary a 50 dollar camera drone with altitude hold,return home (gps) and gyro capable of streaming video on a board with flight controller (telemetry) that fits in your hand. Thats just the over the counter toy grade stuff.

Ignoring the freight charges, the math still doesn't work...until you factor in the weirdo fabrication of money by governments. Nobody in China can see what is what inside their government, so their version of the fed prints money, and uses it to pay for things, like mines and iron ore and factories and peoples wages. Then they sell their stuff made with their imaginary money to us for real cash, after which they lend it back to us, or, speaking more specifically as a Canadian, you American types. Soon you will owe them more than your lifetimes GNP, and they will raise a lovely new flag over the capitol when they reposess.

Or that could be the paranoid rantings of a lunatic.

iadr wrote: You should not hold it against the Chinese for getting themselves a good bargain.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply I was mad at China. They got a sweetheart deal and of course they latched on to it. I'm mad at the political systems that allowed to have it. Which in turn makes me feel like Grandpa Simpson, yelling at clouds.

cj32769 wrote: How's this for crazy / scary a 50 dollar camera drone with altitude hold,return home (gps) and gyro capable of streaming video on a board with flight controller (telemetry) that fits in your hand. Thats just the over the counter toy grade stuff.

Not scary, makes my hobby fun!