I buy a LOT of stuff from china for my own personal use. I would never recommend using them commercially. Undocumented, sold by vendors who have no clue about what they are selling other than their profit margin. If you see it on fleaBay or Amazon there is a good chance you will find the exact same item on AliExpress for less thereby cutting out the middleman's markup of the price. Yes, AliX has a counterfeit prevention program in place that it vigorously pursues. Vendor's tend to be small hole-in-the-wall operations that buy and sell on margin with no product knowledge. You will find the exact same thing sold by many vendors for different prices. Counterfeits/rebranded labeled parts are typically obsolete 70's era parts that are hard to come by and have a high resell price margin. That said, there are LOTS of generic undocumented parts for sale that are made in china. I wonder sometimes if they are "floor sweeping" or surplus discards that didn't pass quality control that were sold on the market as scrap. There are also a lot of well known branded parts but you won't see that in any of the advertising. They sell by part number only, not by manufacturer. Packages get lost in the 3-5 week delivery time but are refunded. I tend to test most electronic parts and have received bad parts, also refunded. It can be aggravating and frustrating but if you sit back and wait it almost always gets delivered. I currently have a backlog of ~45 packages waiting to be delivered.

 

ebay products can be great if you chose wisely. We just spent $5,000 for a special vacuum controller. It was hand delivered by the local seller and personally inspected by me at the work site. Brand new and still in the OEM wrap exactly as the seller said it would be. YMMV

 

If you need it and you need it to arrive on time and be within specifications, don't count on stuff from Chinese (including Hong Kong) sourced parts on eBay. A lot of the time the descriptions are misleading or inaccurate and often the sellers don't have any idea of what they are selling. I have found some really inexpensive (read that: cheap) parts that I am happy with, but so far with precision parts I have had a world of heartache and lots of useless chips. Yes, you can usually get a refund, but getting the wrong part of having the shipping delayed can cause a real problem that might cost something to correct.

Do it for fun, but never count on the parts being on time or working.

 

I bought most of my test equipment on eBay and at decent prices thanks to auction snipers. Only had a couple problems with things not being as described and the sellers usually made it right.

 

Wow, thanks a lot for tipping me off