I find you can get savings by dealing with sellers on ali express and alibaba.

Well China post shipping costs were less than $6.00, so for $325 worth of product, I paid $164

I will await the arrival of the package now, but if the items come packed well and correct, as I have been told, then I will consider this place my first stop for any overseas items I need. This is almost a 50% savings from buying through regular overseas sellers.

I mean, XM-L T6 on star for $3 to $4 and 7135 drivers for $2.25. I just had to try this route.

I will post again when it all arrives in a couple weeks.

What heading did you search in? I keep getting error messages.

You have to click first one of the categories – it isn’t important which one. After this the search function works. It’s a little bit strength.

When I go there, I click on the main logo in the upper felt corner first, then I put in the search words, but it’s difficult because there are many words that have no Chinese meaning, so you will get a lot of false or bogus searches. The words that I use are ones like this:
Cree, driver, 7135, flashlight, XM-L T6, Cree flashlight

pretty much, one word searches work and multiple word searches don’t. You can also refine a search by putting in a minimum and maximum dollar value after the initial search results.

You get a lot of other crap, but I haven’t found a better way. There’s a forum (I think) about searching there. It’s not easy.

The package arrived today and it came padded well, just like I have gotten from HD and CNQG.

Photos:

 

Evertyhing is good. No damage in shipping and all of the leds & drivers look just like you would get from KD or CNQG.

Savings of 48% over the normal shops.

Time was about a month, but I learned the system now, so next time I know how to speed things up.

 

I will definitely be going this route for major component purchases and I can recommend this way, to the point that all went well and the results are very satisfactory.

 

 

Hey OL, are 7135 chips the ones that can be “double stacked” over the existing chips in a driver to increase current to the emmiter?-Rick

I'm not O-L...but yes, you can stack those. Takes a little patience though...

Thanks Match…I see the chips at Illumination supply, I wonder if I can stack a few over the ones in my SB x-thrower to get the current to sst-50 up to where it should be?

Is there a nice post with detailed photos and instructions on double-stacking them? 

-Garry

There are a few posts on stacking these chips. Scroll down on this one. http://budgetlightforum.com/node/2393

Nice lot of spares there Old-Lumens. I feel a little envious. Looking forward to see what becomes of them.

Thanks MRsDNF !  I knew there had to be a good one around here! 

-Garry

Yes, I'm looking forward to that too.

What reflectors are those?

Thanks for sharing your buying experience with TBA. Since you’re asking what others have experienced, let me share mine. It wasn’t so smooth with me. Check out the pros/cons:

Pros

• Initial prices are pretty good
• Selection is decent
• Customer support seems readily available and very polite, friendly and good to work with
• No issues with communicating across languages

Cons

• Ordering is a bit more complicated, and it’s a 3 step process as Old-Lumens states above
• I inadvertantly ordered the package with charger and battery, there was no way to actually change the order (you have to be careful with this because the DEFAULT selection is the entire package)
• I did get it changed through 2 days of email exchange with their customer service
• There were unnecessary delays in processing items prior to shipping
• Example: the order was held up about 6 days waiting for me to answer whether I wanted to include a battery and I had already indicated I didn’t want a battery
• Shipping was expensive – $14 flashlight (Jacob A60) shipping cost was $9.30 for cheapest method, China Post
• The same flashlight was $14.70 at Deal Extreme with free shipping.
• You can’t pay directly, you have to have an account and you add funds to your account, even when you don’t know the total cost, although you can use PayPal to add funds to the account.

So in my experience, I paid more and it was delayed more, and required about 10 emails on my part to get everything straight. It looks like Old-Lumens did pretty well with price, ease of ordering, and delivery so obviously my experience may be an exception, especially since this was a learning process and I made mistakes like ordering the wrong package. So please don’t look at my experience as a deal breaker, just remember to pay attention and order with care.

The shipping cost are only for one Jacob A60 (weight about 200gr) or something more?

Sorry to hear that. I have looked at flashlights there and I don’t see much of a savings. The only things I found were the components, like cree leds and some drivers. My whole order was very light and hence, very cheap to ship. Actually you can go to china post and do just like usps and check the cost before hand. I didn’t know that till I went there and looked.

It is more complicated and for me, I wouldn’t have gone thru the trouble, unless it had been so cheap on those specific items. I don’t know that I would do it with a flashlight due to the shipping costs. From what I see, for a chinese vendor like DX, it costs them about $1 for a light that they will sell for $10, so they can cover the shipping costs that way. I think that is how they manage to do free shipping. After all, nothing is really free. You pay for shipping on every order. They just say it’s free, but it’s paid for.

Again, sorry to hear you had a bad time.

they are a 50mm deep reflector, but I found out the hard way, that they are plastic. That’s my fault for not reading the fine print, but they were only pennies each, so it’s a live and learn. They would be good for a deep reflector replacement in a maglite incan mod.

Buwuve,

Your question is excellent! It turns out I was exaggerating, you caught me with my pants down, andI’m quite embarassed! : I purchased an Ultrafire A20 along with the Jacob flashlight for a total weight, according to them, of 0.522Kg. Now if you’re correct that the Jacob A60 is about .200Kg, that doesn’t make sense either, because the A20 is like 1/4 the weight based on the relative size of the two lights. So the dollar amounts were:

$14.54 for the Jacob A60
$ 9.80 for the A20
$ 9.39 for the shipping for both.

(I hope you’re happy Buwuve making me tell the truth! Sorry Old-Lumens, sorry everybody. I’ll never do it again!)

How did I miss this thread initially? O-L you old dog. You sure learn new tricks ehh? And show us other noobs how its done. Thanks for sharing this and the same goes out to darklion who is having math trouble :-D 

I want to order something like this too so a big thank you to y'all for making it cheaper for me. TY.

Here’s the deal:

I place an order. Shortly afterwards I get order confirmed, awaiting payment, confirmed stock.

But, you see, I’ve learned my lesson. I don’t believe people when they say they have stock anymore. I’ve been burned too many times. So I contact customer service and say “Seriously, are you sure this is actually in stock?” or something to that effect. And guess what? Two times in a row now, taobao have come back and said “well, errr, yeah, sorry about that, it’s not in stock after all”. So what does the “confirmed stock” status mean? Nothing it seems.

I understand that other people have had positive experiences with them, but I find this sort of thing rather irritating.

Since I first posted about Taobao, I have learned some more and I have tried a couple more agents. What I find is that there are many agents and they come and go swiftly. Some of it is fraud by the agents and some of it is fraud by the buyers, but it is an ever changing marketplace, much like ebay.

I have tired http://www.taobaonow.com/    and    http://taobaofocus.com/   with good results. But, I have learned to be patient with them. First of all, we are in different time zones and I have learned to "do business" at around midnight to 2AM my time. It works much better. I still use http://www.go2tao.com/   or   http://www.taobao-buying-agent.com/   for my searching, as I think overall, they get better search results. Then I go directly to the sellers item and link it into the other Taobao sites that I buy from.  I can see that this is a kind of shopping that is not for many folks, but I want the lowest price I can get, for the same items being sold elsewhere.

My dream is that some day, some member from China will PM me and tell me that he will be the go between (like that's gonna happen), since even with some of the low prices on Taobao, the prices can still be haggled, but agents don't because they want their cut and less fro the sale amount, means less for them.

I still buy a few things from regular sellers like FastTech, or whoever might have something for sale, but with inflation, I just try to get things at the lowest price possible. As an example, I just ordered two different 50mm aspheric lenses and 30 of the 15 degree TIR optics. After Shipping, the lenses ended up being $5 each and the optics ended up being 66 Cents each. I was buying the lenses for $1.50 each before, so that was a big savings to me. The same lenses that were probably bought from the seller I used to use, since they came direct from an "optics company" this time.

To me, Taobao is still viable, but the culture, language and ethics differences are still hard and always will be. Patience is a must and it takes about 1 week, to 2 weeks to get through the order process, to the point of shipment, but I know that, so I order a month or two before I want the stuff (if I have the money).

There are other Taobao agents around and there are some I would like to try, but some do not use PayPal, due to all the fraud on both sides of the coin, so I don't deal with the ones that don't use PayPal.

 

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