Road Cycling - Had this Bright Idea...

I was looking for a couple of jerseys the other day and I couldn't find the ones I liked in my size. So I thought I'd check out european Ebay sites because the sizing generally runs smaller. I was on the german ebay site and saw some great stuff that was pretty cheap in my sizes.

The only problems are trying to translate german and how the heck they work payment there. I'm wondering if any of you do any foreign buying on ebay? I found a great seller who speaks english ok and everything but I'm a little leery of the whole thing because of the language barrier in the auctions and stuff. Any thoughts?

I bought a ton of stuff off of ebay.de which is the german ebay. You will find out that shipping is a lot more than you expected. I bought 15 pairs of shorts/tights/jerseys etc... kept about half, sold the other half to get most of my money back. However, sending a wire transfer is going to be around 30.00 or more. The people I was dealing with wouldnt take paypal, or ikobo.com which would have made it a lot eaiser. She wanted 75 dollars to ship the box to the US, but only 4.00 to ship it to Germany. I have a friend whose parents are there, so I had them ship it to her Dad for 4.00 and he turned around and sent it to me here in the U.S.

It was about a 15 by 15 foot box, jammed full of lycra and it still cost around $40.00 Dollars to ship by boat, and took right around 2 weeks.

if you want to translate text or a web page go to

http://world.altavista.com/

Hey great link thanks! I'm never dissapointed when I probe these forums for knowledge. That's unbelievable that they wanted that much for shipping...

The company I was looking at dealing with has items for sale both through the web site and the ebay auctions they run(they are a major seller 5000+).

The jerseys they sell are 30.00 euro for the ones I was looking at, but there are some jerseys they sell on ebay and only have about 20 hours or so left and are still at the starting bid of $1.00, so I thought it might be feasible if I could get them for really cheap on ebay. I haven't managed to figure out yet what they want for payment types but suffice it to say that if I can only do a wire then I'll just forget about it. Paypal would probably be the only way I'd go for it. It would really be a shame because there are some really unique and great jerseys I saw... if only I lived in Europe! :)

BTW, did you get dinged a bunch of additional cash for duty, etc.? I got nailed recently for $33 on an item that costed me 12 bucks! That one hurt.

are these auctions by trikotboerse24 or trikotexpress? I dealt with both of them, Very Nice Ladies. I didn't get hit with any extra customs duties that I am aware of.

The exchange rate has gotten worse, so somethings are not as good of deals as they were a few months ago.

Good luck, and keep us posted.