USPS/Ebay delivery

[davisjt1977]

One other thing buying from ebay Chinese seller is that shipping takes forever, even before the logistical problems we now have. The listed shipping is often more than 60 days, which is beyond the time credit card companies allow you to dispute the charges. I had 2 instances of no show and Capital One declined chargeback. Fortunately I paid through Paypal, using Capital One as payment method, which allows 180 days to dispute. I got my money back. Paypal absorbed the loss, refunded immediately, as each payment is less than $25.
I do not use ebay any more: not only because of offshore sellers but I found ebay USA sellers' prices are often higher than Amazon.

Must be the difference in WHAT we buy. I generally do not find Amazon to be cheaper (or preferred by my purchasing criteria) than Ebay. But I do search Amazon on most purchases. So I do buy from Amazon and Ebay and not always them!

 

[davisjt1977]

If you think that then your stars & stripes sun glasses are obstructing your vision.
However from outside a country where your perceptions are not coloured by jingoism you get a clearer view.
I am just as critical of Australians & the Australian government except they are just not as topical on a forum that would be some where around 90% American .
If you read the entire thread yo would see I am quite sympathetic to the USPS because I know just how difficult a job they face & the critism of their management was the same as the critism of Aust Post management .

Ebay was a wonderful idea till it got hy-jacked by crooks & thieves then overwhelmed by major retailers masquerading as small time vendors.
You will also see I critised the Aust Governments failure to regulate Evil Pay properly allowing them to sell shoody , illegal goods because they pretend to be an auction platform where as in reality they have become a strait retail platform & should be covered by the same retail laws as I am
If I sell a new 25:1 chain saw I am open to a $ 10,000 fine yet ebay vendors sell hundreds a week .

As for the collective mind sets the two countries are at opposite ends of the spectrum

Australians would rather die than buy anything locally made with the overall perception that everything made locally is inferiour to what gets imported , which to be fair is not uncommon and the direct result of bad government policy.
Americians seem to be the polar opposite and will buy what is USA made regardless of the quality because they believe that everything made in the USA has to be the best on the planet for no reason other than it is USA made .

When it comes to politics it is so obvious just how deeply the cold war propaganda has infiltrated the collective mind set of the US population .

A reasonable generalization of the public, but does not fit me. I was trained in critical thinking and make actual decisions based on fact. Ocassionally I am wrong.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Must be the difference in WHAT we buy. I generally do not find Amazon to be cheaper (or preferred by my purchasing criteria) than Ebay. But I do search Amazon on most purchases. So I do buy from Amazon and Ebay and not always them!

What we buy & how we buy it.
Ammozone & evilpay make people lazy
If it isn't on Ammozone then it can't be bought
Could not count the number of times people have come here looking for used parts because the part the want is NLA.
They have searched everywhere and you can not get it because it is not listed on Evilpay, Ammozne or Feaces Book.
Their drop out of their heads when they see I have them in stock often in 2 or 3 different grades & prices
I rarely use evilpay or ammozone, they are usually a last resort.
But I shop for quality, getting some thing for 1¢ less than my neighbour is not a thing for me .
When customers complain abut my prices I give them the oppertunity to buy the parts themselves & I will remove my known good quality ones and fit their parts of unknown quality, most understand what they are being told, but unless you make them think about it you get branded as a rip off merchant , which gets back to what I am trying to get Joed to understand, you have to make people think or they will just follow the rest of the herd .

What I find both frustrating & dissapointing is I can find things made in China faster & easier than I can find the same thing made by a factory in my own community .
Since the swing away from landlines and the partial selling off of the once excellent phone company ( Telstra ) the printed yellow pages is no longer made.What trade ministers fail to understand is the printed yellow pages was a default trade index which allowed anyone to find anything almost anywhere.
The electronic Yellow pages do not do that but of course direct you to the business that pay the highest price most of which are not either local nor produce the goods you need.
The Chinese government set up "Made in China" to allow Chinese factories to sell their produce to the entire planet .
Every one listed are genuine factories or distributors so no rip offs
Despite making several representations to the State & Federal Governments down here apparently "made in Australia" or " Made in NSW " is too expensive for the government to undertake or too onerous a task.
Apparently the various states in the USA & the US government itself are also of the same opinion .

So it appears that both of our countries want all of the factories to close down so we will become totally dependent upon importing land fill from third world countries .
I suppose their idea of a strong economy is every one sitting in front of a screen day trading shares.

 

[bertsmobile1]

A reasonable generalization of the public, but does not fit me. I was trained in critical thinking and make actual decisions based on fact. Ocassionally I am wrong.

Excellent.
That makes 2 of us only 3 billion left to train.

 

[StarTech]

Personally as a purchasing agent for my own company I do my homework on things. I got several vendors that have their websites that also sell on eBay and Amazon. Depending on the item that we need here I might buy from Amazon , eBay, or their website depending on overall cost and delivery times that is needed. One is a JD dealer for the local dealer took away all my discounts so they lost the sales. And DB Electrical is based in my current home state but I can buy their products thru their Amazon site for less than the direct website.

And mentioning that US government pushes us to buy locally even they don't do the same is really embarrassing. I imagine the same goes on in Australia too. Just covered up very well.

Who can blame us when like today I found that Polaris parts distributor is wanting $50 a piece for 6006-ZZ bearings when I can get them from my bearing supplier for $3 each. $9 each if I get the Koyo version.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Don't get me started on government spending
The army bought combat boots & parade boots from a Chinese maker which of course sent the local factory broke & they closed down
Then soles on these boots fall off when exposed to heat so a few years back there was a shocking photo of troops on parade at an Anzac day march ( our veterans day ) with their boots flopping around and the socks clearly visible where the soles of the boots should be .
They all deserved to get medals for standing on the rough bitumen road that even in April can get to 60 deg C in their socks .
The spectacles I am wearing right now were made locally by a company called Engleheart.
Not only wre they Australian made, but done in a regional center where employment is scarce .
They are 40 years old and just about falling apart.
Engleheart closed down because they were the suppliers of pensioner spectacle frames
The new contract went to a Korean company so 200 people lost their jobs directly and another 20 indirectly.
The mill that made the nickel channel also closed down taking another dozen businesses with it .
For the last 20 or so years, GMH had been making a very good executive vehicle called the Statesman hers , & marketed as Pontiacs overseas but the government decided to buy BMW's for the politicans because they could sell them on 4 years latter for a higher price than they paid for them .
I could go on & on & on but I imagine the US government is some what the same .

 

[StarTech]

Sounds about right.

 

[davisjt1977]

What we buy & how we buy it.
Ammozone & evilpay make people lazy
If it isn't on Ammozone then it can't be bought
Could not count the number of times people have come here looking for used parts because the part the want is NLA.
They have searched everywhere and you can not get it because it is not listed on Evilpay, Ammozne or Feaces Book.
Their drop out of their heads when they see I have them in stock often in 2 or 3 different grades & prices
I rarely use evilpay or ammozone, they are usually a last resort.
But I shop for quality, getting some thing for 1¢ less than my neighbour is not a thing for me .
When customers complain abut my prices I give them the oppertunity to buy the parts themselves & I will remove my known good quality ones and fit their parts of unknown quality, most understand what they are being told, but unless you make them think about it you get branded as a rip off merchant , which gets back to what I am trying to get Joed to understand, you have to make people think or they will just follow the rest of the herd .

What I find both frustrating & dissapointing is I can find things made in China faster & easier than I can find the same thing made by a factory in my own community .
Since the swing away from landlines and the partial selling off of the once excellent phone company ( Telstra ) the printed yellow pages is no longer made.What trade ministers fail to understand is the printed yellow pages was a default trade index which allowed anyone to find anything almost anywhere.
The electronic Yellow pages do not do that but of course direct you to the business that pay the highest price most of which are not either local nor produce the goods you need.
The Chinese government set up "Made in China" to allow Chinese factories to sell their produce to the entire planet .
Every one listed are genuine factories or distributors so no rip offs
Despite making several representations to the State & Federal Governments down here apparently "made in Australia" or " Made in NSW " is too expensive for the government to undertake or too onerous a task.
Apparently the various states in the USA & the US government itself are also of the same opinion .

So it appears that both of our countries want all of the factories to close down so we will become totally dependent upon importing land fill from third world countries .
I suppose their idea of a strong economy is every one sitting in front of a screen day trading shares.

I was searching a long time ago for an alarm clock using Google search. I was looking for features, not price. I then decided to do the same search on DuckDuckgo and the Emerson brand showed up. Guess what? That brand was not listed on Google search at all. That was about 6 to 8 years ago & that when I began moving away from the tech oligarchs. Probably why you can find Made in Chyna and not the others. Now I read that the alternative search engines like to use Bing to search in the background & then bring you those results. And supposedly the Russian search engine is decent but I have not tried it. When searches bring up other sources besides the 3 big evil sources, I go check then out because you find a lot of good stuff. Looks like we are pretty much on the same wavelength. And I bought an Emerson clock from a non-evil provider.

 

[bertsmobile1]

I was searching a long time ago for an alarm clock using Google search. I was looking for features, not price. I then decided to do the same search on DuckDuckgo and the Emerson brand showed up. Guess what? That brand was not listed on Google search at all. That was about 6 to 8 years ago & that when I began moving away from the tech oligarchs. Probably why you can find Made in Chyna and not the others. Now I read that the alternative search engines like to use Bing to search in the background & then bring you those results. And supposedly the Russian search engine is decent but I have not tried it. When searches bring up other sources besides the 3 big evil sources, I go check then out because you find a lot of good stuff. Looks like we are pretty much on the same wavelength. And I bought an Emerson clock from a non-evil provider.

Yes sounds like you have it sorted
When I Google search, I go strait to page 2 because page 1 will all be listings , some times even for what I wanted that have expired on Evilpay or Ammozone pages where the item is "not currently available" then there are all the index sites which usually do not have the product at all but have so many meta tags that no matter what you search for they come up high on the list .
I really miss the old printed Yellow Pages which was about the only honest index of suppliers .

 

[SamB]

Don't get me started on government spending
The army bought combat boots & parade boots from a Chinese maker which of course sent the local factory broke & they closed down
Then soles on these boots fall off when exposed to heat so a few years back there was a shocking photo of troops on parade at an Anzac day march ( our veterans day ) with their boots flopping around and the socks clearly visible where the soles of the boots should be .
They all deserved to get medals for standing on the rough bitumen road that even in April can get to 60 deg C in their socks .
The spectacles I am wearing right now were made locally by a company called Engleheart.
Not only wre they Australian made, but done in a regional center where employment is scarce .
They are 40 years old and just about falling apart.
Engleheart closed down because they were the suppliers of pensioner spectacle frames
The new contract went to a Korean company so 200 people lost their jobs directly and another 20 indirectly.
The mill that made the nickel channel also closed down taking another dozen businesses with it .
For the last 20 or so years, GMH had been making a very good executive vehicle called the Statesman hers , & marketed as Pontiacs overseas but the government decided to buy BMW's for the politicans because they could sell them on 4 years latter for a higher price than they paid for them .
I could go on & on & on but I imagine the US government is some what the same .

GMH= The late lamented General Motors Holden. The revival of the non-retro Pontiac GTO was a rebadged Holden,as was the Pontiac G8 GXP. They were both beyond excellent high performance cars and well built.