Originally Posted by
abdon
On a trip to Tokyo my daughter and I went custom bicycle builder hopping. [...] there is one whose name escape me at the moment but they used a lot of wooden rims.
Was the place with wooden rims Amanda Cycles? They made a lot of disc wheels from wood, and the builder has made many mixed carbon- and steel-tubed custom frames.
Originally Posted by
Chombi1
I don't know if their all legit, but there aot of Japanese component offerings at eBay that are priced crazy high. As a consequence, they don't seem to sell very well and stay on eBay for very long periods.
My theory on the crazy pricing from Japanese sellers on eBay is that eBay's tools are difficult and/or confusing for them to use. For one, the prices are typically a direct translation of the yen price to dollars, and not a conversion. For example, an item might be 55000 yen which is $380, but the seller will price it at $550. I know this to be the case because the same sellers have the same items on Yahoo Japan Auctions or Mercari. On those sites, the original yen prices are usually reasonable when converted to USD. Japanese sellers also often have the same item listed multiple times on eBay with different prices assigned; I have to assume this is also due to confusion and not intentional. And I've also known them to leave up listings on eBay for items that have already sold out on another platform like Yahoo. All of that points to issues with the listing process versus Japanese sellers actually having out-of-line expectations on pricing. I think there's probably a button that says "sell on eBay!" that's supposed to make things easy but actually results in these messy, overpriced listings that the sellers then forget about because nothing ever sells.