A recent experience I had leads me to believe that although there may be a huge number of far eastern sellers of a particular item on eBay, there may be a lot fewer actual suppliers of said item. Which might explain not only the inability to supply but also the same error from multiple sellers.

I ordered a 16mm square 16ER insert threading tool on eBay. this was advertised at less than a quarter of MSC Industrial's price. Then a 20mm square tool arrived; obviously too large for my S & B toolroom lathe. I went through the "return item" process with eBay to get a full refund, and then ordered a 16mm squre tool from a completely different supplier. Two weeks later, another 20mm square tool arrived! "return item" time again.

I came to the conclusion that a lot of these sellers are effectively retailers who call off items from a wholesale type operation when they get an order, and if those parts aren't in the correct bin, then the wrong part goes out time after time. Third time lucky with ordering the 16ER tool from yet another supplier, I received a 16mm square item this time.

BTW, all three of these tools appeared to be of good quality, and a quick try out with a European sourced 16ER insert indicated a good fit in the two "wronguns" as well as the one I'm using now.

Edited By Stueeee on 21/08/2019 21:23:06

One trend i noticed recently especially when buying things for Arduino is certain sellers will advertise an item usually with multiple quantities available and a price range from a few dollar to $30 or $40 which one would usually expect the low end to be for one unit and the other end for multiple units , if you look carefully at the pictures there will also be another item in there like a cable or something cheap and useless. So you think this is a good deal and click the drop down menu to grab 10 units and it will be listed as out of stock and the only thing you can buy is the useless part ! They also tend to have multiple listings for the same thing with slightly different prices just to fool you into buying something from them , Another really irritating thing is when a seller lists their entire range of brand X products ( drill bits for example ) and list them in 0.1 mm increments so to get past their advert you nearly wear out your scroll wheel on your mouse getting past them !

Ah yes, I forgot about the 28 days for delivery! I’m not sure I ever waited that long though. I recently ordered some parts from a company. I asked if the prices were inc or plus vat and how much the shipping was for the parts I required. I placed the order online and got several email confirmations. A week later and the parts hadn’t arrived so I emailed asking if the parts were in stock? No was the answer, lead time is 30 days so you should get them in three weeks time. It would have been really nice if they’d told me that up front then I could have looked elsewhere.

As for eBay I’ve only had one poor transaction and although the pictures of the product were very misleading the full description was actually fair. I use eBay virtually every week for all kinds of stuff.