Originally Posted by
misslexi
I had an excellent transaction with seller dy-power for my 20Ah LiFePO4 pack. I see they now only have 3 cell phones for sale, hope I never need that 1 year warranty.
I'd make a distinction between a scammer and a distributor; it's safe to say all scammers are distributors, the reverse is not necessarily so. Many are just hard working people who happen to buy and sell anything they can get their hands on, hopefully legally. Your advice to be careful is good as it's hard to make the distinction based on eBay feedback, level of grammer on the listing and a general feel for the sellers legitmacy.
The problem is how to remove the risk. The only sure way is to buy batteries stateside from a local dealer, we all know what that's going to cost, same for mailorder. Occasionally I see eBay or craigslist listings from someone stateside that bought the wrong thing from China and now wants to flip it, still has some risk.
For now, China owns the LiFePO4 game, you pays your money, you takes your chances!
Yeah, I'm there are other non-scam sellers on eBay.
More specifically, I was talking about the many E-commerce websites and plethora of listings on Alibaba.
http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?...rea=product_en
^^ Most of those are scam listings. eBay is a little bit different, since on eBay you're probably dealing with one guy who is running a small electronics resale business from his flat. He's not going to be an authorized distributor so the cues you mentioned are what you have to go off of. But people on Alibaba and E-commerce resellers should be
authorized distributors from Schenzhen Battery Co or one of the other big manufacturers. None of the ones I checked out were!
And actually, you don't have to gamble just because you want cheap LiFePO4! You can pretty much eliminate risk, even when sourcing products from China.
Call the manufacturer and buy direct. Schenzhen will sell small quantities (I got 10 cells from them for my Father's plug in hybrid project).
