Shipping times from Chinese gadget sites

I like buying cheap novelty items from Chinese gadget sites. I have bought hundreds of items from various sites so far, and have had a surprisingly good experience with them overall. Incredibly I have never had an item lost thanks to AusPost.

Most items are as described and satisfactory as long as you have done your research and know what to avoid. In general, I try not to buy gadgets involving flash memory chips and batteries, because most times, you are getting inferior stuff. Lower tech items are generally OK eg. toys, phone/tablet accessories, houseware etc.

The sites I have used so far are DealExtreme, DinoDirect, Lightake and Focalprice. I am eying a few others like TinyDeal and TMart. The only problem with buying from these sites is the long shipping times. I am using this post to keep track of the delivery times of various purchases to Melbourne (Australia):

DinoDirect: Printer Ink Refill
Ordered: 9 Sep
Shipped: 13 Sep
Received: 26 Sep
Time taken:  18 days

DealExtreme: Novelty Candy Dispenser
Ordered: 2 Oct
Shipped 3 Oct
Received: 16 Oct
Time taken: 15 days

DealExtreme: Pocket Illuminated Microscope
Ordered: 1 Oct
Shipped: 3 Oct
Received: 17 Oct
Time taken: 14 days

More to come...

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Dealextreme Aggregator

Just stumbled across this website called GadgetzFinder that aggregates products from a couple of DealExtreme-like sites (including DealExtreme itself). For those of you who are not familiar with DealExtreme, it is the granddaddy of Hong Kong-based B2C websites that list all kinds of Made-in-China gadgets and offer free shipping for all purchases. Almost all the items are a fraction of the price of similar items sold in western developed countries. For example, I bought this laptop security cable recently for under $4, where it would have cost me $20 in local stores.

The downside to that cheap price is the long waiting time for the purchased item to arrive. On average I have to wait about 3 weeks for an item, but surprisingly I have received every single item I have purchased so far, and believe me, I have bought a lot of items from DealExtreme and others. Kudos to the global postal system! Also be prepared for some hits and misses in terms of product quality. But the novelty, convenience and pricing more than offset the occasional misses for me.

Anyway, a site like GadgetzFinder should come in handy in searching for products and comparing prices. I have bought stuff from DealExtreme and FocalPrice, but haven't tried DinoDirect and LighTake yet, so the site should help in product discovery. Plus the RSS feed seems to be quite useful as not all sites (eg. FocalPrice) provide a feed for new products. Note to self: the RSS feed even works for searches, so I can search for eg. "bluetooth stereo headset" and be informed of new products by subscribing to that feed.

Another nice feature is the grouping of similar products that reduces the search space somewhat, though the result is far from perfect and seems to be based on some kind of heuristic matching of the product names. I understand this is a difficult problem, but it would be nice that they can take product description and images into account and produce even more accurate clustering, since there tends to be a lot of similar products even from the same site.

One final notable mention: the website scales down quite nicely to the small screen on my Nexus One. So now I can do all that product research on impulse from my smartphone!

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