My first rule of thumb when it comes to eBay China shopping is to expect one degree above the worst expectation you could possibly have. Every time I’m optimistic about a purchase, it bites me in the butt, so as a new coping strategy, I just naturally assume that it’s going to be sewn incorrectly or not fit right and this is a surprisingly effective way of deciding whether to buy or not buy something I’ve been eying up for weeks. The “potential for shittyness”, I call it. If it looks like there’s a lot of potential to go wrong, don’t touch that thing with a barge pole.
Take for example this item:
I was very optimistic about it because I liked it and I wanted to believe that it wasn’t crap. When it arrived however, I was met with a very different reality.
A completely different colour, a pulled stitch running across the front (not really visible in the photo), hemmed as bad as you can expect, and the collar was obviously stitched on by some blind, crippled person. They didn’t want to give me a refund either! (And I normally do get a refund, mind you, from such blatant forgeries like this one)
If I like an article of clothing on eBay China, the best I’ll expect from it is that it will be made from polyester chiffon, it will spark with static electricity when I put it on, but it will be sewn to an acceptable degree and fit me well. Sometimes there will be hanging threads, but I just cut those off. This degree is acceptable to me because I spend around $10 per garment and I understand that it’s a fake, I understand that it’s not as good as the real thing, and I’m just happy that it looks great when I put it on and nobody can tell it’s a fake unless they look reeeeaal close. Or they watch me light up in the dark when I’m putting it on/off.
But I wrote this post because I received a package today which blew my socks off! I ordered the following shirt from eBay China a few weeks ago for $10 (in an auction, because the buy it now price on all the listings I could find at the time were $16+ and I wasn’t willing to pay that much):
And this is what arrived at my front doorstep:
I near swallowed my tongue. I was expecting a rip-off, not a re-branded original article from ASOS! The best part of all is that it felt like an ASOS garment—no loose threads, no misplaced stitching, no wonky collar, no material that fizzes up with static electricity when you pull it over your head—in short, it’s brilliant and I love it and it was worth the $10 for sure!
Especially considering that the genuine article is still on sale at ASOS for triple that price (originally quintuple the price I paid)!
Keep your eyes peeled, ladies, eBay China is the becoming the new ASOS marketplace.