Purchasing carving gear on EBay Global sites?

[boostertwo]

Hi,

In looking for some new hard boots, I've been surfing EBay's global sites. Not surprisingly, there is quite a bit of product available on the German and Austrian sites, and some on the Swiss and Italian sites. All at very good prices.

Here's an example: http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2767488087&category=22199

Has anyone had any experience buying items on EBay auction from European countries? Other than the obvious language difficulties and caveat emptor with EBay, would there be any other reason to be wary of purchasing boots through these means?

Thanks for your input.

Cheers!
LH

Vail opened today. Lots of natural snow on the upper mountain!

[GeoffV]

Hey LH,

I've had some pretty good success buying equipment on ebay in Germany and Austria (but then again I am fluent in German). But most of the folks English is good enough to communicate with them. I just purchased some AF 700's in Germany for a great price, just waiting for them to show up. Here are some recommendations when biding on stuff internationally. Make sure the seller is willing to ship to the US, PayPal would be the easists, but nobody really uses it in Europe so the next best thing is a Euro certified check. There are so many more options in Europe for great used carving gear. If you need help translating or communicating in German let me know.

Geoff

[brad]

LH,

Another useful web site is Alta Vista's link to Babelfish or you can go to Babelfish.com directly (you might have to login and get a user ID). It allows you to translate from different languages, german to english and then english back to german, by just copy and paste. I've used it to translate some of the int'l ebay sites but I haven't had the guts to buy from them yet. The deals at times seem to good to be true. Hope this might help.

Brad

[Topi]

thanks to these posts I went with the German ebay. 1st I verified that the seller would to ship to the US and that he had a good ebay record. I won the auction for 42 euros(~$50) it was for a set of Raichle 323 boots with matching step-in snow pro bindings. I used western union for the payment and the seller used DHL to ship it. I received it in about 8 working days. The whole thing with shipping and western union fee came to $125. I thought it was still a good deal so. thanks guys.