Greetings fellow Steemers,

I would like to share you my story and how I moved to the direct Chinese market.

My story begins back in August of 2014, when I had my birthday, and some friends bought me as a present my first e-cig. It was a generic Chinese mechanical mod(battery tube) with a Chinese clone Kayfun, each part costed 40€ so the overall was 80€ from a local store. The next step was to buy a charger for my batteries, that cost me around 14€ from the local store, plus 5€ for a 20ml bottle of e-juice. I was keeping each bottle for around 1 week so I needed 4 of them each month. I would like a pause here and do the math, so let's add the numbers: 40(mod) +40(atomizer) +14(charger) +20(juice) = 114€ total.

I was spending that time around 80€ a month for tobacco, filters, rolling papers and occasionally the lighters I loose/stolen. So I said to myself "Dude, keep that for a month and a bit more and you literally have nothing to lose”. I threw away my cigarettes so I don't get in temptation and it worked just fine. That continued for like 3-4 months, I was spending around 20€ each month for juices. Overall, I decrease my monthly expenses by 50% - 60% after the initial purchase of my E-cig, oppose to the cigarettes expenses. So I said to myself "Let’s invest on a better Atomizer", as I was dig into the vaping trend, trying different coil builds, using different wires and cottons, different Liquid combinations/concentration(PG-VG), watching YouTube reviews and reading forums. In general I started to educate myself about the vaping and learned new stuff, stuff that were not available from local re-sellers or they didn’t have the knowledge to educate or advise me.

At this point I had my first contact with the Chinese online stores, where I start purchasing stuff I couldn’t find in the market and in most cases with ¼ to ½ of the retail price(if there were available). Purchased a Side cutter for cutting my wires (Local stores was selling them for 20€, got one for 5€), Kanthal A1 heating wire (1.5€ /per meter from shop, 2€ /per 10 meters from Chinese website), Organic cotton (8-10€ for 10 sheets, 3€ from Chinese website), same atomizer 40€ from a local store – from 5€ up to 25€ from Chinese market (you could find clones that are really cheap, just for a “test drive” before you purchase the original one, or in some cases I kept the clone as it was almost the same in quality with the original and had only some minor differences – still got and love my Billow V2 clone which I got for 10€) and the list goes on.

All in all, I saved a lot of bucks just to support my new habit. Having positive impressions from these purchases, considering the drawbacks it has purchasing from these stores (yes, there are some drawbacks), I decided to trust more the “no name” products and take the risk to expand my purchases to other stuffs as well, smartphones, MP3-4 players, gadgets, quality of life accessories etc. Doing a bit of research, I discovered a few more web pages that fulfilled this purposes.

And here is the list of some of this sites:

Gearbest: https://www.gearbest.com/
Banggood: https://www.banggood.com/
Zapals: https://www.zapals.com/
Geekbuying: https://www.geekbuying.com/
FastTech: https://www.fasttech.com/
DealExtreme: http://www.dx.com/
LightInTheBox: https://www.lightinthebox.com/
MiniInTheBox: https://www.miniinthebox.com/
TomTop: https://www.tomtop.com/
Wish: https://www.wish.com/

Pros:

• Cheap prices – Value for money products.
• In most cases no shipping costs.
• Big variety of products, especially on gadgets.
• Unique products, only sold to Asia.
• (Personal)Less stress when a product is damaged, stolen, lost etc. as you did not spend a fortune for it and you know where you can find a replacement.

Cons:

• Occasionally bad quality products.
• Comments not always reliable, as sometimes the comments are from the representatives of the site.
• Huge shipping delivery time. Usually 2 weeks minimum and might take more than 1 month.
• Parcel might pass through customs, meaning that you have to deal with rude, non-helpful customs employees and lose one working day (at least what I experienced in 3 countries, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria) – In these cases you can ask from the re-seller to send you a fake e-invoice (usually they can) with the minimum price you need to not pay for customs.
• WARRANTY, if a smartphone for example brakes and you want to claim your warranty (6-12 months, opposed to the European 2 years warranty), you will have to send the product back to China with your own expenses – not worth it in my opinion.

Support varies in each site, you can find automated-robotic responses with no help at all, zero responses or Amazon quality support. But wherever something went wrong, my money was refunded without any hassle. If you ever decide to proceed with a purchase from these sites, the first thing you need to look up is if you can avoid the customs. If not, I am not sure if it is worth it to order from there, especially if the product is too heavy or price is too high. If there is an option for Direct mail delivery or a small fee where you can pay for Direct mail, use it, as the parcel will go usually through Holland and then shipped from there. There will be no signs that the product was shipped from China (Asia in general, as they have warehouses also in Hong Kong, Singapore…etc.) so it will not pass through customs.

I know you need to support your local stores, but hey, we live in 2018 and everything is working around the internet nowadays. Probably most of you should know that stuff already, but I think it will be helpful for people that don't.

I would like to apologize in advance for my English and for the long article. Also, to thank everyone that managed to read through the end of it, really appreciated. I hope you learned something new and useful.
Finally, for the people that are Gamers like me, I also recommend the following sites where you can find some good prices and offers.

Kinguin: https://www.kinguin.net/
Fanatical: https://www.fanatical.com/en/
Humblebundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/
G2A: https://www.g2a.com/r/anomalous
HRK: https://www.hrkgame.com/en/
Instant Gaming: https://www.instant-gaming.com/en/

Keep it High everybody!