So I got an e-mail the other day from a person that got my e-mail address from a supplier I had previously used for a while but stopped using since he raised his prices in the last month. This person is mainly an electronics dealer out of Beijing, China and was offering all the products I was getting from my previous supplier.
I asked him about Paypal and Escrow and he said they can't use Escrow since they are buying the products then shipping them to me, so they need the money up front first. He said Paypal can't be used since they don't have a paypal account in China, but one in Hong Kong and they only use that account for orders over $12,000 USD since it's too expensive to go from Hong Kong to Beijing for smaller purchases. He then gave me their company name, their registration number (which I havn't been able to figure out how to check on a database to see if it's legit) and their address.
I asked him if I could do a sample order for 1 Ipod, which he said was fine and that if everythign goes well I'll up the order to 5 and so on until I feel that this person is legit. So he gave me the Western Union information and Bank Transer information since that's all they accept. The Bank information look's legit (it's a bank account so it has to be) and the Western Union payment address is the same as the company address, which in a way is kinda reassuring.
So I wanted to know should I take the risk of loosing $198.00 (the Ipod is $160 and shipping is $38 which isn't much of a deal until you start ordering more than 5 units) or should I just forget about it and go my seperate way. I wanted to find a way to check his company registration number but I can't seem to find anything on how to do it for a Company in Beijing, China , so if anyone knows that would help a whole lot. Thanks.