You May Not Be Getting What You Expected

I recently read an article written by a someone in the luxury linen business… someone who both manufactures and sells high quality 100% Egyptian cotton sheets and bedding products.  He quoted an excerpt from an email sent to him by a prospective customer asking why his sheets were so expensive compared to those found on eBay or in local warehouse stores.

I chuckled to myself. As an online retailer of 100% Egyptian cotton sheets, I’ve often asked myself the same question: how can people sell items on eBay for less than what I pay for them from my wholesale supplier?

The author went on to describe how he’d purchased several sets of sheets from his eBay “competition” and sent them off to a lab for analysis. After paying several hundred dollars for the lab results which included carefully counting threads under a microscope, he found out what he, (and a lot of the rest of us in the business) suspected: The sheets had been relabeled. A set that was really 200 or 300 thread count had been relabeled as 600, 800 or even 1000 thread count!

In all fairness, eBay is generally a great place to shop. I shop and sell items there myself. Most sellers are honest and ethical and eBay as ways of dealing with those who are not. Like all other shopping, Internet or otherwise, a bit of caution is in order. If a price sounds too good to be true… it probably is.