Has anyone purchased clothing from this site: www.cycle-jersey.com. Prices seem too low and their command of the English language is a little weak.

Al

Looks like the same stuff sold on eBay at about the same prices. Cheap knock-offs. Built for the look, not the functionality.

Cannot tell from their website where in the world they are located.
They might be on Mars and that would complicate returns.

Actually you CAN from a website, using whois, an Internet tool that will tell you exactly who owns a site, and for cycle-jersey.com it returns:

Registrar: FastDomain Inc.
Provider Name....: HostMonster.Com
Provider Whois...: whois.hostmonster.com
Provider Homepage: https://www.hostmonster.com/

Domain Name: CYCLE-JERSEY.COM

Created on..............: 2011-01-13 03:05:51 GMT
Expires on..............: 2012-01-13 03:05:51 GMT
Last modified on........: 2011-02-24 03:10:18 GMT

Registrant Info: (FAST-15229597)

jason chen
huli
xiamen, -
China
Phone: +86.
Fax..:
Email: hztmm@163.com
Last modified: 2011-05-21 15:20:20 GMT

Administrative Info: (FAST-15229598)

jason chen
huli
xiamen, -
China
Phone: +86.
Fax..:
Email: support@cycle-jersey.com
Last modified: 2011-02-24 03:35:54 GMT

Technical Info: (FAST-12785295)
Hostmonster.com
Hostmonster Inc
1958 South 950 East
Provo, Utah 84606
United States
Phone: +1.8014948462
Fax..: +1.8017651992
Email: support@hostmonster.com
Last modified: 2011-01-08 18:40:15 GMT

Status: Locked

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.HOSTMONSTER.COM
NS2.HOSTMONSTER.COM

This means that it's a company that is registered and hosted in the United States, but is registered by someone in China. I would contact the company before ordering and find out where they ship from, if it's China you want to use EMS for shipping, the post office usually has decent deals on customs, UPS and DHL will kill you on brokerage fees.

Reading their copy is pretty amusing:

"High quality tights fabric: light and decrease the wind"

Not sure if that's a reference to aerodynamics or some new gas-canceling technology.

But, they aren't open and upfront enough to actually list any contact or location information on their website. That is a red flag.

I agree, although being located in another country isn't always an issue, if it's done correctly, what is iffy in this case is are they doing it properly or do you need to take special precautions. You can be pretty much sure though, if they are in China that the "team" jerseys are probably legally considered counterfeit.

+1 Strongly Agree

The prices on most of their jerseys were just a few dollars more than what I pay for jerseys at Dick's Sporting Goods. They aren't team jerseys but I don't belong to any of those teams anyway.

I bought a jersey last spring from a similar questionable site. Took about 3 weeks to get the jersey. Its cheap and low quality. I figured it might be but ordered anyway. I wear it a few times a month.

I try to purchase products more locally, given the current state of the economy. But even if the economy was healthy and robust right now, I'd probably stay clear of this one because of the lack of contact information and Wogster's sense that they are likely counterfeit, which often translates into lesser quality.

Yep, totally sure they are paying royalties to the appropriate companies to use the logos.

Support your local bike shop.
Keep your money in your town.
It will have a better chance of coming back to you.
Send it to China and... it will come back to Obama in the form of loans and interest.

Thanks all, don't think I will order from them.

Al

Counterfeit doesn't mean low quality, in fact a counterfeit can be made in the same factory as the official product, just that it isn't licensed by the team, so the rich guy who owns the team, didn't get a cut. The issue is that legally the team can't do much about it, the seller is in China, you would need to sue them in a Chinese court, under Chinese laws, and counterfeiting American goods isn't illegal in China.

The other thing is, you don't even know if the seller in China has jerseys for sale, they could sell 500 jerseys, take all the payments, send you a few emails about back-orders, meanwhile they process your payment, clean out the bank account behind their Paypal account and disappear, and it's either you or Paypal that ends up holding the bag, probably you.

In which case, they might as well be on Mars.

That's why I used the term "often" instead of always.

Well no, if they were on Mars you would need to pay a heck of a lot more for shipping

There are legitimate companies in China, and these days it can be set up so that you don't even know the product was shipped from China. Here is how it works, the seller in Chinay, fills in a waybill that appears as domestic for the United States, they load all the shipments on a skid and ship that skid to the logistics carrier along with a manifest of what the items are, how many and the value for customs. The carrier loads the skid into a container (or a trailer) along with a whole bunch of other stuff, from other shippers, adding all the manifests together. The container is then shipped to the receiving country as a single shipment, destined to a domestic carrier, that means a single brokerage fee and single customs is assessed. The logistics carrier pays the customs, and bills it back to the initial shipper, depending on how much of that customs belongs to their items. The domestic carrier, then opens the container, removes all of the skids, breaks down the skids and sends the items on to the final customer.

If the item is returned, it's returned to the logistics carrier, who will bundle up all those returns destined for the originating country, and then return them there, where they will be handed to a domestic carrier to return them to the original shipper. Nearly every large International carrier, has a logistics arm UPS does, DHL does, FedEx does, and I think TNT does.

Now the Chinese company sets up an account with a US bank, what the bank does is they receive money from customers, and after subtracting a service charge, forward the money to China. The Chinese company could also be a trading company where they ship Chinese goods to the US and US goods to China.