Buying aftershave/perfume off EBay

PomBear

is it reliable?

jor el

No

PomBear

what if the user has good feedback?

punkindrublic

It depends. I wouldn't buy it from someone who has less than 1000 positive feedback and less than 10 negative/neutral but that just me. It's very risky.

NicOda

I would exercise caution buying anything from eBay, if it seems too good to be true it usually is...Caveat emptor and all that.

In regards to buying perfume/aftershave you should be aware that Kenzo, Guerlain, Christian Dior, and Givenchy brands can't be listed on eBay by unauthorised dealers, even if the item being offered is genuine.
This is as a result of an injunction by LVMH prohibiting this, as it first came to light initially on eBay.fr, this ban now extends to all eBay sites!

rubadub

PomBear wrote: »

what if the user has good feedback?

It can be fake accounts posting good reviews, or simply people who know no better and think it is real.

kmick

I use http://www.strawberrynet.com and its top class. My wife gets her stuff through my account as well. The prices are good and after 10 orders you get 10% off every order. I have been using it for 5 or more years and have never had a single issue. I cant recommned it enough.

Nolimits

Having never bought either on Ebay I wouldn't be 100% but I'd just treat it like any other ebay product. Only buy it if the seller has a few thousand feedback with a minimum of 98% positive (it's rare to get 100% with so many sales as there are bad buyers as well as sellers). After that I'd have a quick glance through the people who left them feedback this isn't really necessary if their sales are in the thousands but I'd usually do it anyway just to make sure that the buyers have also left feedback for others and been in many transactions. I personally have never been scammed on ebay I think you have to be really unlucky to be scammed if your careful.

jimoc

Besides the fact that probably about 90% or more of perfumes etc on ebay are fakes, you also have to take into account that they will probably get stopped by customs and you may be charged customs duty and vat based on the IRISH value of the goods, not what you paid for them.

And of course there is the lesser known problem of evaporation due to non-airtight containers being airmailed in non-pressurised holds.

A friend of mine ended up buying about €60 worth of empty bottles a good few years ago due to the fact that the caps weren't airtight and they were shipped in a low-pressured hold

Mountainsandh

PomBear wrote: »

is it reliable?

Hi PomBear, I suppose by now you have / or not, made the purchase ?
If you haven't, my experience is positive.
I buy a lot of stuff online, had reservations about perfume, but just bought my first bottle off an Ebay seller with good feedback, and it came in, full, fully wrapped, and the original deal (have used same brand before), in all of 3 days, from the UK .

I didn't go for the cheapest, I went for one whose pricing seemed reasonable, and who had great feedback.

And really once you have found a ebay seller/shop you like, it's easy to buy back from the same every time.

rubadub

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I didn't go for the cheapest, I went for one whose pricing seemed reasonable, and who had great feedback

The smart dodgy dealers will sell at a higher price so you think it is not to cheap to be true, many will have shill accounts -also many feedback is from people who cannot tell the difference -not to say yours is fake.

It was on watchdog or some similar program and they showed the difference, the ones they showed were compared side by side with the real ones, they were a different colour. They said it might be using unsafe chemicals and that one big difference is that the cheap ones have little or no "fixer chemical", this is what is supposed to cost a lot in perfumes, it is a substance that makes it last longer on the skin and not just evaporate off.

I expect if you googled it might have methods of comparing. e.g. I expect f you have the real one you could put a drop on some fabric, and a drop of the uncertain one on fabric and smell both some hours later to compare.

Mountainsandh

Rubadub, I Know what you're saying, and the thing about the fixer. I had a cold the last week, so was unable to smell it at all a while later, when a lady at the petrol station complimented me on it, on my way back home after work, so mine does last . And I'm French, so maybe a bit more familiar with the whole perfume thing (my Mum brought me in great ceremony to buy my first perfume when I was 16 ).

As regards feedback though, one can be discerning. I actually spend a good while reading feedback, going back a fair bit, positives, neutral, negatives, and have on occasion spotted suspicious ones.

It's like the people bidding on their own auctions to bring the price up just that bit, who let someone else win afterwards... For bigger purchases or multiple listings of same item, I always take a look at how bidding goes (and bids history) before I place one.

Over the last 7 years, and hundreds of transactions, I've had just 3 bad experiences really.

rubadub

Good to hear it seems genuine, it was really more general advice for all to read.

Mountainsandh wrote: »

As regards feedback though, one can be discerning. I actually spend a good while reading feedback, going back a fair bit, positives, neutral, negatives, and have on occasion spotted suspicious ones.

A good site to use is www.toolhaus.org , if you do not know it already that is. It filters out the positives so you just see negative & netural feedback, it saves you trawling through loads of pages.

Mountainsandh

rubadub wrote: »

A good site to use is www.toolhaus.org , if you do not know it already that is. It filters out the positives so you just see negative & netural feedback, it saves you trawling through loads of pages.

Great site Rubadub, thks, didn't know it personally, the "mutual" tool might come in handy too, in case of suspicious activity.