Mercenary Buying from eBay suppliers - what i've learned from experience

[Paula Newman]

The problem with joining a group such as this is knowing where to contribute to help the most. As a relative newbie to jewelery making, i feel quite inexperienced alongside so many skilled artists on here, but i did discover something useful when building up my stock of fixings. Like many people, i use eBay to source silver and gold chains, ring mounts, earring blanks etc. There are some amazing items out there, sold from Hong Kong and elsewhere, including amazing Tibetan silver items that i love to use. What i noticed was that these listings usually start at 1p but soon climb to something more so that the free postage is soon irrelevant. Having been unsuccessful for so many items that i had bid on, i noticed that the same items were listed for buyers in australia, germany and elsewhere and some of these had no bidders at all. I could see no reason not to bid on these and so placed numerous 1p, 10p and 99p bids. To my astonishment i won over half, for the initial bid. With free postage i soon acquired a stock of silver fixings for peanuts...

 

Has anyone else discovered this? Does anyone else have any methods of finding the best deals for these source materials on eBay that they'd like to share?

[Bridget Bradshaw]

My sister did alot of buying on Ebay, and bid on some items that were classed as 925 sterling silver ...I did a repair on an item for her, that came broken in the post.....got my solder ready and my blow torch ...only to discover that the "sterling silver " was silver plated copper!! so beware ..it looks and even feels (in weight ) like silver but my oh my it certainly wasnt!!!

[Paula Newman]

Wow, that's interesting. Obviously i was suspicious, and mostly i now bid on "tibetan silver" bookmarks, but most of what i use tends to be small fixings, pins, rings, and thongs. It's a valid point though, and sometimes cheap is cheap for a reason...

Thanks

Paula