What are your thoughts on buying used test equipment (from well known brands, HP/Agilent/Keysight) off eBay from China and Singapore? Most of the time the prices are significantly lower than offerings from the Americas and Europe.
It would depend a lot of what site you are buying them from. Also I suspect Singapore is very different than China.
I've bought several used Fluke items (1990 era) from Taobao. The smaller items I had sent via their consolidation/international shipping service and it was fine.
One of the concerns is there are weird shipping restrictions on shipping electronics out of China. If you look at the info for the Taobao forwarding services they list some very vague restrictions on forwarding electronics. It was never an issue for my small items but they were low cost and so I could afford to lose them.
For the larger items I purchased (~$800) I cooked a plan to have one of my coworkers who lives in China buy them for me and forward. Only to then find out China Post will not ship electronics out of the country, at least not from an individual. Obviously this is absurd as (prior to Trump jacking up UPU rates) half of AliExpress was shipped China Post. He ended up finding some guys who shipped them to Hong Kong at which point they had someone who worked for UPS who somehow managed to get them entered into the UPS system weighing 1/3 what they actually weighed. They repacked them into one box and there was alas some damage. I had to eat it.
Apart from these items, which I had to haggle massively on (as list prices were stupidly high) I've really not found that used prices from China are that good. I find USA used sellers on eBay to be far cheaper.
The issue is there are so many different ways to ship from China and so many different ways things can go wrong. So someone else's experiences may not be that useful. Also returning an item is usually not cost effective.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
