Wow, nearly 12 days to ship a somewhat older item is a bit rough. That was pretty standard op about 5 years ago, but definitely not the norm these days, even with slow new preorder stock coming in.

Don't have any experience with Pitney Bowes at all, but I sort of suspect the usual "We gave it to USPS" and the post office claiming "We haven't received it yet" back and forth nonsense.

 

ShowZ was using pitney bowes until supposedly very recently. Pitney Bowes or as some say "Pitney Blows" was too slow so ShowZ stopped using them. PB is on the US side of the shipping journey. Otherwise mascotzone is pretty reliable based on what I've heard.

 

Anything ordered Oct 1 would have been SOL due to the Chinese Holiday. The whole country shut down through Oct 10. If mascotzone then started working on back-orders on Oct 11 and got it out Oct 12 then I'd say that was pretty good. That's a week and a half of backlog to get through. And as I understand it, they take the holiday seriously and really do shut down to travel and be with family. I'm having no issues with mascotone and my current MP-44 KO pre-order.

Since then, I think The Happenin Rhinoceros just got caught up in the unlucky Pitney-Bowels syndrome. However I did just get a 3 day delivery of some waterslide glue and it seems to have passed through P-B according to the label, so they must not always be horribly incompetent shippers.

 

The orders I've had through ShowZ that were handed to PB showed up on my doorstep in 48 hours. This is new territory for me :-(

Not to mention, I placed several other orders during the fall holiday. All have since arrived, and none of the others took 22 days to get to the US after shipping. My gut says mascotzone is charging $10 for shipping and using the cheapest possible method to pick up extra profit.

 

All the Chinese e-Bay sellers (as well as other e-Bay sellers) play with the shipping price. Many offer free shipping, but clearly they need to pay for shipping. Others will give a crazy low price on the figure, but then charge $90 shipping. I'd say completely ignore the individual costs from China and just look at the combined. It is all a game. I made an offer on what should have been a $120 to $130 toy here just to see what happens when they try to sneak an extra $90 into shipping.


I'd say if you get a good price on their standard shipping then that's about the best you can do. I've not tried to pay extra for expedited shipping from China as I only see reports of it actually taking longer than the cheap/fee option. And really, the cheap/free is back to 2 to 3 weeks delivery right now.

As for 2020, I've had lots of packages hit the USA and spend way longer than 22 days circling around. I had one sit in Chicago customs for 4 weeks to clear back in July and last month there was one that USPS took to Cincinnati, say for 14 days, then Michigan, then back to Cincinnati, and finally to me. I seem to think the Chinese sellers have done their jobs if the package hits the US on time. After that, our whole customs/shipping sector seems to be doing a fairly craptacular job this year. I did have a "carbot" package take 88 days this summer, but bought from the same seller again last month and got a bigger MP-36 in 18 days. I just can't blame the seller once the package leaves their door.

Unless you're paying for expedited shipping. Then you certainly have a beef with them. Maybe not in April when everyone was surprised, but now they should know better than to take extra money for services they know they cannot deliver.

 

I know how eBay pricing from China works, my friend. My point is that it took forever to leave China, and is lingering longer than normal here. The "Oh, its not their fault, its the pandemic" justification fails miserably when literally every other seller I've bought from in Oct and Nov has had zero problems getting me my purchases inside of 30 days. In my experience, this is usually a sign of dirt cheap shipping combined with poorly handled customs information. Furthermore, the price of the figure with the shipping was as much as I could have paid for it elsewhere, so not exactly a deal worth putting up with this for. If you don't believe the shipping method the seller chose dictates whose hands it ends up in once it arrives here, you're kidding yourself. Also, this thread is full of folks complaining that orders from mascotzone or their affiliate seller names took forever...hardly seems like an isolated incident.

You can make excuses for them if you like, but I'll continue shopping with sellers that don't charge for shipping and then cheap out on the service to save a buck at my expense. I have several items with free shipping from Ali Express (traditionally very slow shipping) that were ordered much, much later and are arriving at my door soon. Mascotzone might get me what I ordered and technically be legit, but I'd prefer to spend the same amount in the future to go with sellers I know have a proven track record with shipping speed.

 

My first experience with Uncle Billy Shop isn't going well. Spotted KFC Stratotanker on his cbyg3016 account on eBay. He had the best price and 3 available, but decided to visit his website directly. The toy was another $12 cheaper plus I could pick up some waterslides that he doesn't list on eBay.

It has been a week and he notified me this morning that he's out of stock on Stratotanker. He did refund me already, but that $122 was the best price I could find. The toy is off the eBay listing, but still shows up as "in-stock" on his own website.

So I can say that "in stock" doesn't mean in stock and his website looks super scary as far as inputting payment info. So nothing nefarious, but it is a bit frustrating. I wish he included his full waterslide assortment on eBay as I'd rather spend a dollar more to avoid his personal payment page. It would also be nice if he kept his website up to date and didn't continue to list things he doesn't have.

 

What's scary about clicking a PayPal button?

 

The Uncle Billy Shop website throws up flags with my anti-virus/security software. It's not "known dangerous, do not proceed" bad but comes up as "use with caution" and his site gives me the "connection is not secure" warning. I used to blow this stuff off a few years ago, but take it more seriously now with merchants getting hacked because they're not keeping their own sites up to date. If the merchants are being careful then you'd assume they would have upgraded their website by this point.
I did in fact use PayPal as that extra layer of security. And there is no way PayPal is ever getting direct access to my bank account. I think PayPal is doing a pretty good job of security, but someday they'll get hacked (either from inside or outside) or have their own internal blunder and accidental data release so I don't want to share more than I have to.

I read my credit card statement each month and match those charges up. Got caught twice in 2018 by presumably a lazy online merchant who wasn't keeping things up to date and a credit card skimmer at a gas pump along the interstate (those red seals on the pumps had been broken). Maybe I'm too cautious after getting my info stolen twice? It is a big hassle I don't want to deal with again.

 

I really need to pay more attention to Chinese holidays. All I tend to ever think of is CNY or 11-11.

 

The connection not secure warning simply means he's not paying extra for an SSL certificate which, if he's processing payment by sending us offsite to PayPal, he really has no need to. Sure, that means the login system might not be as secure, but we are talking address and order history versus financial information.

I've had my credit card info leaked/stolen twice in the past year as well, so I do sympathize. The last one tested it out, ironically, by placing an online order at a Christian store selling Jesus merchandise. Oh, the irony...

 

Boardie just shared/posted this earlier:

 

Yea, that seller is a total fraud, provided a tracking number that 17track couldn't find and china post said didn't exist

 

Just got refunded today. Called and complained multiple times to Ebay but he's still selling them.

 

Yeah, the moment I saw him list another 8 figures, I knew it wasn't going to happen. Anyhow, he refunded me willingly but I'm still considering leaving negative feedback just to prevent people from buying from him.

 

I contacted him and we exchanged a few emails, he kept up the guise that it was legit but once I escalated the PayPal claim it was refunded the next day willingly as well.

 

Which probably means he's going to try to run this ruse for a while and wanted to avoid the negative feedback that might derail him.

 

Probably

 

One of mine was $3000 in shoes ... in Haiti. That should take care of footware for a good chunk of the island after their last earthquake.

I'm also using a unique password for each of these sites so they won't all get compromised at once. I've made orders at over a half dozen different sites in the past year or so and found I need to keep a cheat sheet. I know most of these browsers have password managers, but I've not been using them. Normally this works, but I nearly lost my FT-10 Phoenix pre-order yesterday in the time it took me to pull the password list from under my pile!

But back to China eBay sellers. I've now got 5 different packages circling around the USA including 3 sets of replacement parts from sellers like bababobo who are coming through for me. Most of the sellers seem to be sending my packages to a 3rd party shipper in Indiana at this point so that must be the current "cheap method". It does cause a week or so of no tracking updates and surprise deliveries lately. At least my current troubles are misassembled toys and not scamming sellers.

 

Kinda been wondering about that myself. I've had a large number of recent shipments go through Greenwood, IN of late, didn't think much of it at first, but seeing it's become the norm for SpeedPAK, SF Express, even a couple Epacket shipments, I'm thinking they might have a pretty big operation building there?