Thanks for the advice and condolences guys. The prices and free shipping drew me in, but in the long run wasn't nearly worth the hassle to try and save a few measly pennies for each knife.
As far as PayPal is concerned, its just another scam that gives false hope to those thinking that they have any real sort of blanketed protection agreement over purchases. As stated by PayPal during a dispute, the dispute is between the buyer and seller. I will never link my bank account to PayPal. It gives them the legal right to steal money right out of your account, which is designed to protect the seller, not the buyer (you). I'm sorry but I'm the consumer here. Not them. When I saw all the monetary incentives PayPal kept spamming me with to link my bank account, I became suspicious and googled for opinions. Bottom line: PayPal is a legal scam and you enable the worst of it when you link your bank account. Paraphrased from a PayPal CSR I spoke with: They can even steal your money when you explicitly tell them not to use your bank account during transactions without your explicit permission. They are continually challenged by the legal system and then amend their consumer agreement to hang just under what is legally allowed at that moment and time. My credit card company carries a huge hammer when it comes to consumer fraud and I always win my chargeback disputes over the criminals at PayPal. Always keep your documentation in chronological order so you can do the same if need be. Its unfortunate that most of us are geared to using PayPal as the standard for making online payments, which significantly drives up everyone's costs for goods sold.
For those that have pending orders, please make sure you send several emails to the vendor asking about the status of your order. Also send your emails with a read receipt confirmation to see if anyone even reads your email message. It adds credence to your PayPal dispute/credit card charge-back, when they fail to deliver.
Thanks again to this forum and information sharing amongst us gadget junkies!
My new knives (T01-A) arrived after 26 days. I ordered on DB, because on tinydeal it was out of stock and on exduct it cost 5$ more (with shipping). I need two, so I chose DB again, because 10$ more would be to much (my first order needs under 18 days, the last about 50).
One of them has some scratches on the handle (two 1cm scratches [you can see them and also feel them with your finger] and a few smaller) - but this is a small quality problem of SRM. I will send an email to DB to ask for a solution - maybe it's a black hole service email - maybe not.
Bought a Sanrenmu LB4-763 from DiscoveryBargain, ponied up the extra $1.50 for shipping. Shipped in retail packaging, got it 10 days, and at least 3 of those days it was sitting in Hong Kong Post waiting to be processed - definite thumbs up from me.
My SRM 962 arrived in 14 days with the free shipping option. Good stuff. The problems seem to arise with partial shipments of products that mght be out of stock. Order one at a time !
In the UK this is a zero risk transaction. Paypal cannot access bank accounts without permission. Any non-delivery would be an automatic refund once a credit card chargeback form is filled in assuming you've funded the Paypal purchase with a credit card. Note the chargeback is against Paypal not the vendor.
Got my SRM 763 from DB today. Well packaged and shipping was pretty quick: two weeks! If I hadn't had such a bad experience last time, I would think these guys were fantastic. As it stands, I'm glad they were able to redeem themselves. Hopefully they have gotten the misshipment stuff out of their system.
At one point I thought this was rather obvious and started to say it was a mirror site for focalprice .. i either edited my comments or wanted to hear someone else confirm my suspicion...Someone in another thread said this and I wanted to be sure before i started calling people (nasty ) names .
If you look at the bottom part of this description where they talk about customs it says it . [ FOCAL ] isn't responsible ..
Customers should contact local customs and check whether this product can be imported or not. FOCAL is not responsible for customs confiscations due to the destination country��s custom regulations.
Pretty clear that DiscoveryBargain and Focalprice and wsdeals and lazerpoint are the same companies ..
hate one hate them all ...if you've been lucky .. good for you .. they have burnt a bunch of people ..
I've been dealing with Discoverybargain for a year and when I first start I thought they were a mirror site of Focalprice but over the months their site has evolved and many of the similarities have disappeared. I think they copy much of the Focalprice website, including many of their products and descriptions.
Often when they have a new knife they will copy images from other sellers until they get their own images posted.
I will think twice before ordering anything from the Focalprice family. They all have bad feedback on BLF. If I can get the same item elsewhere at a reasonable price, I will buy elsewhere.
Mhh, two more orders are coming up on the 45 day deadline. Well, Paypal dispute time it is, then.
My first experiences with DB have been positive and I like that they stock some knives that are otherwise hard to find but if I have to mark my calendar for every single purchase, then I'm just going to for over the extra few bucks and order from Exduct in the future.
Im in the process of a PayPal dispute with these idiots for the second time. But I have an excuse... I created 2 separate orders on the same day. What a crappy company! I didn't get a reply until I filed a dispute and they denied the refund. Time to escalate. I receive my Exduct.com orders within 10 days every time and they usually ship the same day.
STAY AWAY FROM THE FRUIT CAKES AT DISCOVERYBARGAIN! Rude and complete total foolish idiots!!!! Sorry... just want to make sure no more people get taken by these scammers. For the rest of you that have received your products, its probably a matter of time before they try to rip you off as they have attempted with so many ohters. Read the other knife forums and Google... they are notorious for shitty customer service and not refunding what they did not ship.
Well I'm 5 for 5 with them, so Lady Luck seems to be with me - so far. In spite of some of the horror stories in this thread, I still couldn't resist to place an order for an Enlan EL01. However, this time I paid the extra $1.70 for registered airmail as a little insurance.
I was showing my GB-763 to a friend who likes knives and he asked me to order 2, so I went back to DB since they have the best deal. I ordered 3: 2 for my friend and one to give away. Then the order didn't ship for a day. Then another day. So I looked at the order and was horrified that to se I had ordered the LB version (aluminum) instead of the fiberglass one that I had showed my friend and knew is what he wanted. Wrote to the Contact Us address and explained and they said they would just cancel the order, refund my PayPal account, and I could order again. Later that day I got the full refund. So a big thumb's up for them fixing my mistake! (slow shipping saved me this time)
However, when I placed the new order, somehow the connection back from PayPal to DB didn't work out so while PayPal sent the money and I got a receipt from PayPal, DB shows the order unpaid. I replied to my earlier e-mail where we had done the refund and heard nothing. Since it is a separate order, I wrote a new e-mail this morning. Haven't heard anything yet. So they are kind of hit and miss. I'm sure this will work out eventually.
FOLLOW-UP: The next day I got an e-mail that they had marked the order as paid and would be shipping within 48 hours. Registered shipping was free I think because the order was over $20.
i did receive my package in ~4 weeks. but their customer support is not very good. after i placed my order, i noticed that the postal code is missing from my account info. i am 100% sure that i gave them my complete address and i have a complete address on paypal as well. sent them an email about it, never got a reply. and when i received my package, the postal code is actually missing from the package. so, it's lucky that i still received it. missing postal code is no big deal, mistakes happen, right? but the fact that they never bother to reply my email tells me how much they care. come on, even DX replied my emails. so i will probably not order from them again unless they have something that i cannot get somewhere else.
Just wanted to contibute with my recent experience of discovery bargain.
I ordered a SRM 939 about 3 months ago, and completely forgot about it until about 1 month ago.
When I realised I had ordered and not recieved it, I emailed them. They didn't reply for a few weeks, then finanally got a generic email asking me to check my post office etc.
I wrote back, saying I was disapointed, and that I would not be ordering again. I didn't expect to hear anything else about it.
I go an email from them today, telling me they are going to resend the knife, and asking me to pay an aditional $1.70 for registered mail (which I did).
Not sure what to think of this, I did pay for registered last time, but never recieved a tracking number.
The whole situation seems to be resolved, but I will probably not order from them again (but they do have a few hard to find knives that I want...)