Chinese sellers using California addresses to sell their product

Question

How can Chinese sellers use a California address in order to sell their stuff and ship it from China? Why is this allowed?

I avoid Chinese sellers because shipping takes so long. How does one go about reporting them to eBay?

eburtonlab · Answer

Sellers are supposed to ship from the location they specify in their listings, but not all of them do so as they should. You can report such sellers for item location misrepresentation, but until eBay cracks down that is not particularly effective.

Probably the best way to deal with sellers that misrepresent item location is to avoid them. The "US only" item location filter selects items that are listed as being in the United States; however, as you have seen, not every seller that lists items in the US ships from the US as they should.

Before ordering you should check the estimated delivery dates -- that is a good indication of where items actually ship from. Also, going to a seller's profile page or feedback page will tell you where the seller's account was registered. Although some overseas sellers do use US warehouses to ship their items (and some registered US-sellers may employ overseas drop-shippers), if a seller is registered overseas, that raises the likelihood of an item shipping from outside the US, particularly for multiple quantity commodity items. Checking seller feedback will often reveal if there are problems with long shipping times, canceled orders or other supply chain warning signs.