I wanted a new cheap,SD card reader. The top half-a-dozen all appear to be from the same place and priced at 99p. When I go to purchase them, they're a quid.
I know it's only a penny, but isn't there some sort of control that prevents sellers from advertising one price and charging another?
They also all claim to come from Southall, but when I scroll down there's an address for a flat in Hong Kong and this is when I select 'UK only'.
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if you want it tomorrow guaranteed, lash out £4.99 on one on amazon.
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>> if you want it tomorrow guaranteed, lash out £4.99 on one on amazon.
>>
I am very wary of eBay, though I have purchased an ancient Tandy TRS laptop (£20) and it went fine.
I hear about memory devices and adapters for them having malware within.
One thing with Amazon, I purchased a supposed real Apple iPhone charger from them - not a 3rd party seller.
About a week later I got an email from Amazon asking me to dispose of it safely and a full refund appeared on my card.
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>>I hear about memory devices and adapters for them having malware within.
Thanks for that, I'll try to remember to only plug it into the telly.
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It'll be a pile of s***e with a 50/50 chance of working and a 0% chance of being reliable.
Not that Amazon is guaranteed to be much better, but with care you can do ok.
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it may surprise you to know that I buy a fair bit of "lower end of the market" tech stuff via eBay, and I can honestly say nearly everything has been just fine, including a number of cheap SD card readers like the OP is looking at. In fact if you search for "sd card adapter usb" the 99p one I have is at the top of the list, albeit from China.
However if I was spending lots more I'd go somewhere more reputable!!
Last edited by: smokie on Wed 10 Mar 21 at 00:29
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Chinese importing is a big thing here, Sales of Goods Act, Fit for purpose, quality, warranty and customer service are not.
I wanted to buy a little Bluetooth transmitter a bit ago. I bought one in Meiggs, which is the area where the Chinese importers are. Paid $2,500 or thereabouts (bit less than £2.50). When I got home it didn't work. So I went back to change it and this time took a device to test it with.
A bit of foot stamping and teddy bear throwing and they agreed I could change it. As an aside try having such a fight in Spanish with Chinese people who barely speak it. Many years ago I had a delightful Chinese Mandarin speaking girlfriend but the vocabulary I remember isn't all that applicable to returning goods to a retailer). They had about 30 on the rack, we tried them all, none of them worked.
That would pretty much sum up my experience with Chinese knock-offs.
I would not buy that stuff remotely where returning/exchanging is such a royal PITA.
There are Chinese goods which are non-knock-off and merely cheap s***, and those things can be acceptable.
A while ago I encountered a £2 SD Card which was a fake. Purported to be 16gig but got full at 2GB. I couldn't work out how on earth there could be profit in it. It sort of somewhere between intrigued and irritated me so I enquired. Turns out that the labour, raw materials, packaging and shipping costs don't actually exist. They are all jobs done in the midst of funded manufacturing and shipping. So the £2 is essentially pure profit shared unfairly between the street seller and the shipper. Makes more sense, somehow.
Anyway, TL:DR, it's s***e, don't waste your time.
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I find I'm buying less from ebay than I used to. Bargains seem harder to find than they used to be.
If you want something like a handful of 4.8mm x 20mm load-spreading large-flanged blind rivets (one of my few recent buys) then it's the place to look.
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And me. I flogged a stack of bike gear and small ornaments last summer, they went for a lot more than I expected, including a leather jacket that went for more than I bought it years ago. As Manatee suggests I buy obscure bits and bobs from it. Books and DVDs only if cheaper than elsewhere.
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Ebay pricing - Zero
