I remarked on this topic a few weeks ago, but I was unaware at that time as to the extent of this problem. (When I went to revisit the thread after a couple of weeks, I noticed that it had disappeared. I was curious as to why .... it's the first time I had ever seen a thread disappear that didn't have offensive comments, or some such.)
I am a media seller so I often compare prices and am aware of the major players in this category. During the past year, I began to notice a lot of sellers with surprisingly low prices on new release movies and TV shows. In fact, I raised the subject after I myself purchased a couple of new release DVD's and they each took 4 to 6 weeks to arrive, with a China postmark. I buy from Canadian sellers first and, when unavailable, from the U.S. These DVD's were shown to be located in Canada and the U.S.
I still purchase quite a few DVD's on eBay that I am unable to acquire through my own sources .... not for re-sale but for myself and for family members. Without fail now, I carefully check the feedback of each and every seller .... looking for the negative China comments. There are a great many sellers who indicate the location as being in Canada or the U.S. but their large number of negative feedback clearly indicates that they are shipping from China. Some sellers have 20 or 30 negative feedback complaining about the length of time it has taken; the fact that they were shocked to find that they were being shipped from China, as well as a lot of complaints about fakes and little or no communication from the seller. Because these sellers have so many sales, their percentage manages to stay around 96 to 98.
I find it hard to believe that eBay has no process in place to spot these sellers. Even if they did a random check, I'm sure many of these sellers would be caught. And from the number of refunds being issued by each seller, some of which must have been requested through the eBay dispute process, you would think that there were some alarm bells going off.
It's not my job to spend hours reporting these sellers. I would just like to caution anyone who buys media online to be careful to check every seller's feedback. I don't know if this is happening in a lot of categories because I don't buy a large variety of items on eBay, primarily media.
