"UK Only" location filter now includes China

[fire_alarms]

I am finding that it is now  impossible to filter the loation of the products that I want to buy

I click on the "UK only" filter but then I have to go through 1000s of listings that are located  in China but claim to be in the UK.

This is making for a very bad buying experience and is putting me off even trying to find products on this site.

Am  I wasting my time complaing to the site administrator or should I just shop elsewhere?

[mr._standfast]

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@paul0458 wrote:

Many people have had such a bad experience of buying inferior goods from Chinese sellers that they do not want to see anything from them.  We should be entitled to filter them out!!!!

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"Many"n the board is a small fraction of the huge volume of business which goes on on eBay, Something probably approximately half the people who have bad experiences, have had them with sellers who are male or female. British-born ethnic minorities figure about equal to their proportion of the population. Let alone with those of modest IQ or education, a criminal record or a record of policy violations on eBay. Plenty of people think they should be entitled to filter out those groups, but they aren't, won't be, and with some of them figure the lower in our estimation for wanting to be.

Like the great majority of those who leave feedback I've never experienced seriously inferior goods or a misdeclared item location from any Chinese seller. There are categories, and especially shopping for the cheapest in those categories, which invite trouble. But they invite it from British sellers too, and often their items originated in China.

A third of the negative and neutral feedback you have left, not excessive in number and perhaps perfectly justified, is for Chinese-based sellers. None of it is for misdeclared location, which is the topic of this thread. The logical conclusion is that either it hasn't happened or you didn't much mind it at the time.

[0125arwen]

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@fire_alarms wrote:

I am finding that it is now  impossible to filter the loation of the products that I want to buy

I click on the "UK only" filter but then I have to go through 1000s of listings that are located  in China but claim to be in the UK.

This is making for a very bad buying experience and is putting me off even trying to find products on this site.

Am  I wasting my time complaing to the site administrator or should I just shop elsewhere?

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Just shop elsewhere if youu need it in a hurry.

[tisworthmore]

As I have said before, checking the time stated for delivery is a dead giveaway, however it did occur to me that when viewing an item,several more similar items are shown and  are very tempting to click on.This is when you could easily become confused. I think that "similar items you may like"  should also have the filter you have asked for  but of course should still be checked.

[mr._standfast]

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@tisworthmore wrote:

As I have said before, checking the time stated for delivery is a dead giveaway, however it did occur to me that when viewing an item,several more similar items are shown and  are very tempting to click on.This is when you could easily become confused. I think that "similar items you may like"  should also have the filter you have asked for  but of course should still be checked.

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Checking and acting on it, if you buy  and a delivery estimate isn't met. If a lot of buyers have to do this for one seller, a few of the items from China will just make a moderate UK delivery estimate, but most won't, and his is going to mind the waiting and wondering even more than you do.

Applying the filter to "items youi may like" isn't a bad idea, but the topic of this thread, for those who distinguish what people do from what they are, is items which such a filter will let through. When you open a listing, reading the description is the popular prejudice, and reading the item location and delivery estimate doesn't add materially to that.

A simple search for "evening dress", UK only,  gets 430,865 results, overwhelmingly cheap and overwhelmingly Chinese, even if you don't order the search by lowest price plus P&P. They tend to look a spectacular fit on the spectacular, but I have taken expert advice, and am told it must be done by pinning up a large tuck at the  back.

I can see this being a nuisance, but it isn't an inescapable one. Using the "over £20" filter reduces the results to 82,029. Setting £50 to £999, about the minimum that would keep me out of serious trouble at home, gets it down to 12,408, with a high proportion of British personal names.

[carrd53]

I select UK as location on my search results and item is sent from China. Yes it is a con and I only want to see items that will be posted from UK. That is what the filter should be doing but the sellers must be lying saying the item is in UK but its not.

[45joanna]

Many chinese sellers ask UK residents to list their item, so they can say that they are UK sellers.

I was asked myself to pose as a front for chinese sellers

HOW TO SPOT A CHINESE SELLER:

1) The delivery time is a week or more .... from UK, even for 2nd class, the delivery time will never be a week or more

    Very often, there will be no delivery choices ...  like 1st class, recorded,  etc

2) sometimes in the SELLER'S DETAILS, where you find  the sellers address, it will say that it is not the return address

3) they have more negative feedbacks than usual, like .... it took a month to arrive or it did not arrive, poor quality, no reply to problem, etc

ALSO

A) Did you know that we subside chinese sellers' post ?   that is why chinese sellers are able to send an item from China

    much cheaper than it costs us to send the same item from within UK ... that is not very good ! if you have to return an item to China

B) Ebay gave China a special treatment deal in order to get into the chinese market ... but it failed to crack the chinese market ...

     but still they get preferential tratment

C) Chinese sellers do not pay any taxes, VAT, or proper posting prices to the UK ... so they do great damage to UK economy

     and put out of business many UK tax-paying retailers

[mr._standfast]

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@45joanna wrote:

Many chinese sellers ask UK residents to list their item, so they can say that they are UK sellers.

I was asked myself to pose as a front for chinese sellers

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Well that's one, then, but I don't know where you got "many", and don't believe there are.  I think  "pose as a front" seems unlikely language for them to use, so I think they suggested something else.

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@45joanna wrote:

A) Did you know that we subside chinese sellers' post ?   that is why chinese sellers are able to send an item from China

    much cheaper than it costs us to send the same item from within UK ... that is not very good ! if you have to return an item to

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No I don't. The Universal Postal Union is a UN agency, and provides for one country paying "terminal dues" to another, where the traffic is predominantly in one direction. I don't know about China to the UK, but it is unlikely to be very different from the case of China to the US, for which it was about a dollar a pound some years ago, but has been updated recently to cater for increasing e-commerce. Postal rates are still low in China, but Chinese workers having a lower standard of living doesn't constitute a British subsidy to China. More the reverse if anything.

What's "have to"? You are addressing people who know perfecty well that you can't be required to return a misdescribed item anywhere but the declared location, and will get a refund without return unless the seller funds return postage. I don't believe we have heard of a single case on the board where the seller has done so.

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@45joanna wrote:

C) Chinese sellers do not pay any taxes, VAT, or proper posting prices to the UK ... so they do great damage to UK economy

     and put out of business many UK tax-paying retailers

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Chinese sellers sending items under £15 from China don't collect or pay VAT. But eBay now require Chinese holders of UK stock to register for VAT, and if they could escape paying import VAT on bulk shipments, we would surely find British sellers who import their own items doing it just as much. But they can't.

[scotlandscorpio]

I sympathize with fire_alarms. I have the same experience. When I read through the Negative feedback for these "UK" sellers, there is always a buyer who was lead to think that the purchased item was to be posted from the UK, when in fact the item came from China. I have just read through the small print of a seller concerning posting. They admit to being on a different time zone and the item will take 9 days to reach the buyer. This is not someone who posts from the UK, and yet they state in their listing that they are. Is this to be considered Good Practice by Ebay?

[markybsemporium]

Same problem. Still not received my item, should of been today. Checked the tracking info, didn't tell anything. Sent message and they gave me an address to use, did that and still nothing. Messaged again then (someone different replying) said can it be fixed/replaced and would give me 30% off. I want the item i paid for. And yes it said from UK. Not the first time i have been caught out. If you select UK it should be guaranteed the item is in the UK.

[mr._standfast]

Then today is the day you could open an INR case, and the 29th is the day you could ask eBay to refund you. If it is actually coming from China, that will happen more often than not, and if even a fair proportion of buyers do this, it becomes unsustainable as a regular business practice.

[paul0458]

you shouldn't have to put in above a certain price when looking for an item.  I don't want to buy from China.  i have bought several items all far to small - even for my daughter.  they make clothes for the Chinese market to sell in europe and it doesn't work.  The goods I have bought have been of very poor quality material.  I have learnt my lesson.  We should be able to filter out chinese goods .  Of course, once you have returned an item you cannot give feedback.  Not satisfactory.  

[paul0458]

no there is not but there should be!

[mr._standfast]

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@paul0458 wrote:

you shouldn't have to put in above a certain price when looking for an item. 

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You don't have to. Only if it matters to you. As is usual in these threads, you have never left feedback containing the words "China", "Hong Kong" or "Location", or indeed "quality" or "size". The generous interpretation is that these problems only started to matter when you saw the anti-Chinese bandwagon under way.

[45joanna]

In reply to mr-standfast reply

1) There are MANY chinese sellers with a UK front ... and the proof is that many people are complaining about it

     That is why this discussion is here with so many people adding their complaint  and there are many other discussion

     threads on the subject

2) The United Postal Union agreed on favouring China with SUBSIDIES TO ITS POST,  when China was a Developing/Poor country

      China should no longer be categorised as a poor country as it is now officially the 2nd largest economy in the world and it is 

      the largest exporter of goods in the world in terms of value.

      The postal subsidies that were agreed for China also predate the boom of e-commerce ... i.e. it was only intended for

      standard postal purposes,  not for commercial purposes, as it has become nowadays 

      This is a LOOPHOLE that is being exploited extensively by the chinese sellers

      The Financial Times says that about 2 MILLION PACKETS A WEEK arrive to UK from Asia

      I would add to that figure the goods shippped from the "warehouses" in Europe

The following articles have appeared in UK newspapers to highlight the issue.

Mail on Line,   dated 11-10-18 on the  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5641459/UK-retailers-furious-Chinese-firms-use-loophole-let...

Financial Times, dated 7/1018    https://www.ft.com/content/3af8bfb8-ad3a-11e8-94bd-cba20d67390c

(Please do a Google search to find this article for free: UK retailers squeezed by postal subsidies for Chinese sellers)

Many other countries have the same problem and USA are now willing to do something about it.

https://tamebay.com/2018/08/trump-calls-for-chinese-seller-postal-subsidies-to-cease.html

3) Chinese sellers do not pay any UK taxes because they do not have warehouses in UK ... they only have UK addresses

    that pose as fronts to fool the buyers

    The only warehouses that they possibly have are with Amazon. Amazon offers the facility of storing and posting the goods for the

     sellers .... This does apply to Ebay

     I am pretty sure that any stock in UK is already being moved to a European country in order to continue exploiting the loophole

     at the UK's expense.

    These "warehouses" do not have to be in UK ... they can be in any country in Europe and the goods shipped to UK from there

     That is why some Chinese sellers are able to quote only 7-10days for the goods to arrive

mr_standfast, I do not know what your angle is, but you cannot pull the wool over our eyes.

Maybe the UK government is not prepared to tackle this issue in case it upsets its relationship with China on top of Brexit, but this is a problem that is affecting many buyers and and sellers alike ...  and it is adding strain to the UK economy 

[ellymoo]

I think Mr Standfast likes Chinese sellers because they could put UK sellers out of business. 😉

[paul0458]

usually they want you to return to china nad it clpothing it oftgen costs more to post back than to buy in the first place. 

[paul0458]

well said ell re Mr. Stqandfast.  maybe if we all stardted contacting ebay directly to complain they might listen???? 

[mr._standfast]

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@45joanna wrote:

In reply to mr-standfast reply

1) There are MANY chinese sellers with a UK front ... and the proof is that many people are complaining about it

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Don't count them. Weigh them. Now if you wanted British eBay sellers to be prevented from impoting and selling Chinese goods instead, as so many of them would like, it would add some credence to your claim of concern for the economy.

You are a business seller of long standing, who has just stopped selling and made your feedback private, in an area in which the Chinese have recently become big players.

[mr._standfast]

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@paul0458 wrote:

usually they want you to return to china nad it clpothing it oftgen costs more to post back than to buy in the first place. 

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And thus prey upon people who can't be bothered finding out that they can get a refund without doing so. Bad sellers prey upon people who can't be bothered finding things out, no matter where they are based. You seem to want the Chinese to be a whole loit better so that they can be equal.

[jestaudio]

Feedback is largely getting to be a waste of time, I've left perfectly reasonable negatives for "big" sellers who incidentally always have a returns address of China only for it to be removed within hours,