Dealextreme vs other distributors

I hope this can help other BLF readers in making purchasing decisions. For over a year or so I've been regularly ordering products from DX. So far I've ordered most often from DX. I was introduced to them first, but now I've also been ordering from Priceangels, Focalprice, discoverybargain, and ebay. I've become more interested in finding alternatives to DX as time goes on for various reasons I'll explain below.

DX plus points:

On a plus side, DX has the largest product selection, although most are overpriced junk. The few times I've gotten broken products from DX, they sent replacements quickly. Time will tell if Priceangels or Focalprice are as good for this (perhaps someone on BLF can answer that?). I've also wrote several negative product reviews which DX did post... which proved to me DX is fair on customer product reviews. The reviews and forums do help you to know quite a bit about the product's quality, specs, manufacturing, etc. Lots of photos shown. Big product selection (which may not be available -see below). The free registered shipping on orders over $20 is good. However, DX competitors often let you add tracking for a $1 to the free shipping which is great if you just want one or two items under $20.

DX negative points:

All of my DX orders took a week or two just to get packaged and shipped. I'd never put up with this from any 'real' online store. Not one of my orders DX actually had the product in stock. Almost every order gets split, so some items are sent right away with registered shipping and then another package or two is sent later unregistered. However if the item is worth $10 or more they'll send it registered (which is nice).

DX has lists product as available for purchase when it is not. Customers who pay for EMS shipping are very angry, because DX shouldn't be even offering EMS shipping, because it simply doesn't have the product in stock. Several times now I've found weeks turn into months while DX has sat on my payment for a product they could not produce. It was up to me to contact customer service, complain, before they admitted they could not get the product, which should not have been listed as available for sale.

I found that DX was faster last spring and summer and used to deliver with Hong Kong post in about 3 weeks. Then the holiday backblogs started in the fall and in the Chinese new year. I had some products take 90 days to deliver, and others that said in stock never even shipped in 6 months.

DX lists many many products that are absolutely not a 'deal'... like dollar store items for $10. If you ask for a price match it doesn't happen. If you post about the insanity of the prices in the forums it is often just deleted.

Like any store, "buyer beware". Often products on DX are misrepresented in name, or specific information listed... ie. not 3000mah batteries or 300 lumens etc.

I would never buy anything from DX that cost much money, or where I wanted warranty support. I'd say 1 in 10 products needed 'fixing', ie. loose bolts, badly attached brackets etc. This is likely true of most budget Chinese sellers.

I'd never buy anything from a cheap chinese site that had materials for food or consumption for health reasons. There are too many cases of Chinese products with lead paint, melamine, or toxic plastics to risk your health on it. I've seen plastic pipes, water filters, bottles, 'cigarette oil' and endless other health risks for sale.

DX forum problems:

I found certain DX forum admin to behave like tyrants. They'd threaten to ban you if they didn't like your posting or the question you asked, even though it didn't violate any terms of the 'rules'. They just reserved the right to lock threads, delete or censor postings, depending on what they felt like. What gets removed is indiscriminate, so customers don't really know what is allowed and what isn't. Sometimes they let people discuss what product is a good deal, and other times they remove it if it makes DX look bad.

The latest silly thing is to start a 'postive comments' thread, where people are to post what they're happy with about DX, because the forums are mostly full of complaints by unsatisfied customers.

For an example testimonial, a loyal DX customer got fed up with rude treatment DX forum admin. The customer reported the issue to DX customer service only to find that the admin banned them from the forums. I've witnessed rude responses from admin in the forums, when customers turned there for help when DX customer service was useless. A customer should be treated with respect or they'll leave and not return. They need to fire some forum admins...

Priceangels:
A month ago I placed orders on the same day to DX and to priceangels. The package from Priceangels is here now, but DX shows that their package is still only somewhere in Hong Kong.
Priceangels, has many of the good aspects of DX, but the downside to Priceangels is that they have much less product selection, there are very few reviews posted, and no dicussion forums. Someone here recommended I try them for budget lights. I'd never heard of them before, and I'm glad I gave them a try. I will certainly order from them again.
Ebay:

I've been ordering from Ebay for years. Largest product selection, although much less with free shipping. Although you can find free shipping on Ebay on some products, it's never tracked/registered like DX and competitors. Some sellers give you little info about a product and a single photo. Sellers vary from product to product, so you need to check the rating with each seller. Paypal buyer protection for products exists which is nice. But the one time I recieved a misrepresented/damaged product, and made a paypal dispute, it was 'resolved' that I'd need to return it at my cost to the seller, where shipping cost more than the price of the product.

Focalprice

I've ordered a few items from there. It seems that the lights on focal price are cheaper because they have cheaper emitters. Customers report a bad sk58 for example. Nice website, limited selection.

Discoverybargain

They had a nice selection of excellent quality Sanrenmu knives, which were much better than DX knives. The website design and clarity of communication is not as good as DX. I bought one knife and added tracked shipping. Slow website server. Limited product selection. If I wanted another Sanrenmu knife I'd likely buy there again.

Thanks for this dimeotane! I'm pretty sure that your information will help a lot of newer members and probably even some of the older ones.

but we have already a "rating DX" thread....

For price comparisons, use www.ngshopping.com .

They added Manafont lately, but Kaidomain and bestinone are out for the moment.

Also, many ebay sellers have their own websites (usually linked from their profiles), where they have lower prices due to not having ebay selling fee.

Also, don't forget to look for coupons at www.retailmenot.com or other coupon sites. Could save you anywhere between 3% to 50% on purchases.

True, but this post fits under 'budget dealer experiences' category, as I've had a few experiences to share. Hope you don't mind.

The problem with putting it under the rating DX thread, is that my post is making comparisons to several others as well. Also, I find that informative postings can easily get lost in long threads among the small comments posted....

Thank you for this page. Often I have to search on every store, now I have this one and could save some time. I don't know, how this page search the products, but some products are missing (for example the new Ultrafire 504B with XM-L of DX could not be found).

I think they crawl the sites every week or so.

They're sometime not very up to date with regard to products or prices, but usually give a pretty good idea of what price you should pay for a certain item.

They also have a pretty responsive customer support, so you can suggest new sites to add to the database or ask about their search process.

I just hope their search mechanism was faster and didn't sometimes need to be clicked twice for results to appear.

Thanks for the info dimotane. I will have to give Price Angels a try. The quickest Ive ever gotten an order from DX is about 5 weeks. The waiting absolutely wears me out. I guess I’ve been lucky with the out of stock stuff. Only one item I’ve ordered has been out. They eventually refunded my $ without me asking. I was still waiting patiently.

I rate Manafont first

Kd second

Dx a distant third