That's why you should pay attention to the brand. I believe they can sell things that are legitimate but they also do create generic versions of everything. Years ago, I purchased a 'fake' iPhone from China within Ebay. The phone..worked. It was really ghetto, though. I think it doesn't matter with accessories and stuff. If you buy a bunch of cheap, cute phone cases from China, It's worth it. In my opinion.
Does it work as well as a "real" iphone would? Does it work with whatever service provider you use, or did you have to get somebody to unlock the phone first. I've always wanted an iPhone, but I'm just too cheep to buy one for myself xD If I could get a fake one that would work just as well, I don't think I'd care much.
My experience in eBay has been fairly good. I've ordered about 189 items both eBay and AliExpress and 97% of the time, the quality of the items are great for the cheap price. Sometimes I even win auction for $0.20 and the quality of the item is still amazing. This can differ as I mostly buy phone cases and accessories. There are times where friends order from me jewelry, they are quite "okay" to be honest. We always keep a low expectancy so it turns out well. I only had to refund for broken orders (about 5 so far) and items which did not arrive. I've never had trouble with sellers on this matter either. What I can tell you is, standard free shipping is slow, it takes about a month sometimes, 15 - 20 days if you're lucky. Always buy from high rated sellers, and check for how many people have bought the same time before. Ordering items from China is cheap and most of the time worth it. If you have a little patience on the side to wait for your order, then you're good to go!
I've always found it so neat to be able to win an auction for less than a dollar. I feel bad though sometimes xC. In regards to any orders like this, I've still never had any problems! The rest of your post has some pretty good advice though. Keep a low expectancy. You kinda get what you pay for I guess.
Yes, I do buy from China because I see a lot of unique designs of items there that's not available in my country, so I buy them. However, I would avoid $100 or so electronics from China because of quality issues and I've experienced it myself. But for other items, then they're satisfactory like batteries and chargers, earphones, etc.
When I bought the 'iPhone' I remember it working fine. I couldn't really compare it to a real one since I never had one. And this was a really long time ago. Probably 7-or so years ago so back then, phones weren't really all that high-tech anyway. I just remember it feeling kind of... flimsy or cheap feeling compared to maybe a real iPhone from that time era. It wasn't dysfunctional or anything like that.
There are two different types of cheap Chinese items that you can find on eBay. Electronics and others like cases and stuff like that. Do not buy cheap electronics from eBay. They are of really bad quality, and they can break or even damage other things that you use them with. For example, if you buy a one dollar phone charger, it might send the wrong voltages your phone and affect it. It's not worth it!
I personally cannot recommend buying inexpensive Chinese goods off the internet, as I have had several bad experiences with them. Although eBay does give you some sort of fail-safe in case of a defective product, I have, on several occasions, received products that were not up to the mark, or that would simply straight out break after one or two uses. The worst offenders were always electronics, as they seemed to be shoddily made, and nothing close to the product shown on the website. Unless you were extremely sure of the seller and they seemed completely reliable, I cannot recommend buying products from China. True, the odd purchase has been satisfactory, but I cannot guarantee anything.
I have not found any that were of decent quality, some people appear to have been lucky and found plenty of quality items, but I have not. Plus I find they can take months to arrive at my house. And the extra couple of bucks I'd safe isn't worth it to me.
I ordered my husband a PS3 controller and charging cable for another controller. I don't go on ebay enough to think to look at where it was coming from. I didn't find out until I had ordered it, and saw the "when to expect it" date. It took about 2 weeks. Which was really annoying because he needed them almost immediately. That was my fault, though, for not checking if it was coming from the US or not. When it finally arrived I found out the controller had to be plugged in to use. That just isn't convenient at all. But, again, my fault because I didn't pay attention to whether or not it was wireless. Honestly, I didn't even know they made them wired. And then the charging cable for the one he already owned? Didn't work at all. But I wasn't going to send a 2$ cable back to China. so, maybe I'm too inept to order from China and other people will do just fine with it, but I won't do it again.
I've had nothing but bad experiences when ordering stuff from China - and there's practically no recourse when a seller from there rips you off. Most of my worst experiences were when I ordered stuff from China via Alibaba or Aliexpress. All of the items were low quality counterfeit knock offs and not the real thing. Some of the items were of such poor quality, the plastic components on them literally melted partially during shipment. Another problem I had was many of the vendors would only sell a given item in quantities of like 5-10 or more. A few times I went ahead and bought them in bulk like this even though I only needed one of that item, because the total price was still cheaper than buying one of them here in the US - then the seller only shipped me a partial shipment, promising they would send the rest out to me at a future date, which of course they never did. Do they honestly think I'm going to believe they're doing to pay for shipping *twice* to fulfill my order?
Well no because 90% of those cheap items sold from China are pretty useless to me and the price is really unpromising. But if the seller has fairly good ratings and sell cheap, I would definitely consider what they have and purchase what they need from them because who doesn't like getting things for a lower price? But as for buying things from China/Hong Kong, I've bought electronics from Hong Kong with expedited shipping but never really from China because as you said, the shipping literally takes forever. And for cheap little inexpensive items that I'm buying, I'd rather buy it for a bit more money and receive it faster.
