You may wonder where do I get all my Asian (mostly Korean) cosmetics from, since I live in Europe. Well, I am notorious e-Bay customer. Even though there is a lot of websites specialising in Asian skincare, e-Bay always wins with prices and choice. However, if you want to buy foreign stuff on e-Bay, there is a few thing you should be careful about.
Country of origin
Most of the stuff I review here is Korean. If you're interested in any particular product, try to find out where the brand is from and then when you are looking for it on e-Bay make sure seller is from that particular country. It still may not give you 100% certainty that product is genuine, but I think that when you buy Korean product from China the risk of getting fake is much bigger.
Some time ago when I was looking for one particular item I noticed that one seller was selling it much cheaper than others. A moment later I realised that this seller was from Hong Kong and I asked myself a question - why Chinese seller would sell Korean product cheaper?
Feedback
When you click on seller's nick you will see a complete profile including information like: where are they from, how long are they e-Bay members and feedback statistics.
After clicking "See all feedback" we can read other users opinions about seller/buyer. Usually there is loads of positive ones, so I always focus on the most recent negative ones.
It's important to look closely into comment's content. Sometimes the person who wrote comment makes mistake, and for example posts positive comment as a negative. Also quite often you can see people giving negative opinion on product's effect - which in my opinion is unfair when we talk about cosmetics product - seller doesn't manufacture them, so can't be responsible for item's properties. Instead we should judge thing like product description, time and quality of postage etc.
Shipping
A great deal of sellers offers us free economy postage. From my experience, economy postage from Korea may take approx. 3-4 weeks. Standard shipping costs usually $2,50 - it offers us tracking number and arrives in approx. 1-2 weeks (my record order from f2plus1 took 5 days to arrive). There are also express services available, but they are quite pricey $20-$30. It's always worth checking if seller offers combined postage, so we pay fixed price for the postage, no matter how many things we order. I always order few things at the same time to make it worth waiting ;)
Caution: some time ago when I noticed that one seller had two auctions for one product with two different prices. The difference was the postage price - the product that was a few pound cheaper had postage priced at... $100. What's weird on the search results there was "free postage" next to product, after I went in auction page the $100 was shown. I think it was some kind of mistake (auction is not there any more), but I always double check the postage price since then.
Freebies
The last thing on my checklist, not very important, but if we can get something for free then why not? ;) The majority of sellers adds some freebies to our shopping as a "thank you" gift, but not all of them. Once I ordered quite a few things from one seller - five full size products - and I was super exited for my freebies (usually the more you order, the more freebies you get), but I didn't get a single one. Fair enough as seller didn't promise any in the auction - I just assumed I will get them, which was my mistake. Since then I always check if seller offer some free samples.
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| Freebies form seller f2plus1 added to order of three full size products. |
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| Freebies from seller Sing-Sing-Girl added to order of one full size product and three sets of samples (three samples in each set). |
That would be pretty much it, if anything else will come to my mind I will edit the post. If you have any questions feel free to ask :)
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