I spent a lot of time looking at TangTrade and here is what I found:
- Very stramge: the entire site has had the character combinations "CA" and "CHI" removed, so you won't find any "Camera" on there anymore, instead it's all "meras" and there is no "China", instead it's just "na" all the time. What's up with that???
- There are virtually no sellers with good feedback as compared to ebay on there AT ALL. Even the very few "reputable sellers" have no more than 20-30 feedbacks at the very most and none of those has 100% positive, meaning they ALL are selling junk!
- Most sellers on TradeTang have absolutely NO feedback whatsoever, and yet they are all listing hundreds of items. They all seem to just hope for ONE stupid idiot to send them a load of cash so they can send them some cheap garbage in return.
- Disputes are mostly decided in favor of the Chinese sellers, or they automatically default in favor of the seller, because the buyer has only 2 days to complain.
- There is no legal recourse, meaning those Chinese thieves can do whatever they want, claim whatever they want, deceive and defraud you any way they want whithout you being able to do anything about it, except for leaving some angry feedback - a darn expensive privilege...
- There might be some honest sellers on TradeTang, but it's going to be a very painful hit and miss. Instead of making or saving money, you might loose a lot of money in the process.
- Even on eBay, if you buy some Chinese MP3 players, there is an 80% chance that the memory is unusable. They are NEVER the same as the original they are copying, and any components like batteries, chargers etc are always the very cheapest most miserable junk, many times it's the very junk other manufactorers had thrown out by their quality control.
- Most "reputable" Chinese sellers are selling on eBay already. Basically, the only stuff you will find on TradeTang that isn't on eBay at a lesser price, are the replicas. Replicas cannot be sold in the US unless you want to take the risk of being thrown out from eBay and PayPal for good with an excellent chance of even being sued. And since the quality of any of these replicas is ALWAYS totally inferior to the original, it's not even going to be a lot of fun using them yourself!
- Everything that looks to be unbelievably cheap is bound to be a disappointment. These are desperate people, trying to fill their wallets with your cash, so they will claim anything to get you hooked. Years ago I discoverd Musoland.com, where they sold thousands of replicas and they claimed they could make ANY guitar you wanted if you gave them pictures and specifications. Well, I had a Gibson Corvette and I wanted a copy of that guitar with a few improvements and my name instead of the Gibson logo, which was a somewhat legal project. They offered to make a minimum of 6 at a price of $250 each, which was unbelievably cheap for such a custom project. This was to take 6 weeks to be delivered, which was unbelievably fast and sure enough I didn't even get pictures of a first prototype until 3 months later. The prototype was just some Les Paul replica in the same color as the Corvette, but without ANY of the Corvette's attributes. They actually improved it somewhat over the course of the next 2 months, but they didn't even come close to the original. In the mean time, I had already paid $1500 plus shipping, of course, and all of a sudden I didn't hear anything from Musoland anymore. It took me a lot of time and effort, including appeals to the Chinese Trade Commission, to get some of my money back. Mosoland got closed down eventually when Gibson, Fender and Ibanez went after them and they only suceeded in bringing them down, because they all have their guitars produced in China - by "reputable" factories.
The fact is that any Chinese product that isn't genuinly supported by a US or European, or even Japanese manufacturer, is still nothing but a shadow of the "real" thing.
On the other hand, I ordered some 100 Breitling replicas once because I wanted to use them as a giveaway at a tradeshow. I had the manufacturer print the face in my company colors and my company name instead of the "Breitling" logo, That was a great success and still today I happen to meet people at business events with my watch on their wrist. That was one of the exceptional experiences with Chinese manufacturers I encountered. These watches were top quality. I did the same thing with other items like Mont Blanc replicas, designer sunglasses and polo shirts, always applying my own logo and people just bent over backwards to get one of those. And strangely, while I wasn't too anxious about the quality of these items, they turned out to be GREAT - because I wasn't dealing with some desperate little fraud!
I think TradeTang would be a great idea if they would apply rigorous action upon thieves and frauds. However, China is 80% fraud and as it is, TradeTang is just another entity to pronounce that exact property of Chinese business, spoiling it for the few honest businesses!
