@haegenschlatt Ok. Here’s what you do:
1) Check where they’re shipping from. As a general rule (I’ve had tons of exceptions), it’s less reliable coming from Asia than somewhere else in the States, Canada, or the UK. Haven’t had much experience with others.
2) Check the sellers ratings. I like at least a purple star (500–999). For products where I’m spending less than 5 bucks, I’ll go lower, and for under 2 dollars, I take a chance on the yellow stars.
3) Check the actual feedback. This is the time consuming part. You click on their feedback score next to their username on the product page in the upper right hand area. If I see any negative comments in the past 1 or 6 months, I’ll check them out. No, there is no way to sort by which type of feedback they left, just the date they left them, so you have to click a lot. I look for a few things: patterns (really late shipping, product is broken/fake/imitation, product is really cheap/description wasn’t accurate). I also check for the sellers response, if any. If they respond with their side of the story, that’s fine – I often read that the buyer wanted a refund but refused to return the product. However, if they retailiate (ie buyer is a liar, buyer is a crossdresser, namecalling, etc) I don’t buy from them no matter what – I don’t want to deal with personal attacks if something goes wrong with my purchase. For just a few, maybe 3–8 – hey, you can’t satisfy everyone all the time. For more, I look really closely – if they sell 1000+ a month and have 3 negative reviews a month, it’s much better than if they sell 400 a month and have 3 negative reviews. I’ll also chance it with a lot for the under 5 products – after all, if it turns out that I was scammed, that just means I have to make dinner one night instead of getting take-out.
So I guess you have to ask yourself: How much are you willing to possibly throw away in order to possibly save down the line?