The other day I bid on an auction at Ebay in a knee-jerk reaction. Hunting for a similar item that I had already won an auction on earlier in the day. The items I bid on were autograph cards of basketball player Wes Unseld from the Washington Bullets.
They are cards that are sort of cheap because the autograph is on a clear sticker and then placed on the card. The athlete, celebrity or whoever never even sees the final product with these "on sticker" cards produced by the thousands by the trading card companies. The signer is handed (or sent) a roll, or sheet of the blank stickers that are the size of a small band-aid to sign usually in black or blue sharpie pen (magic marker type ink) I prefer the "on card" autograph cards but those are sometimes harder to find and depending on the product are often more expensive.
Well my mistake was not paying attention to WHERE the card was coming from. The auction plainly shows that the location of the item I was bidding on is in CHINA I think because the item location reads "China, UT, China" I just saw the UT part and thought "Oh its in Utah!" I got overexcited and was trigger happy.
Normally I pay very close attention to where something is located and ALWAYS try to avoid the problem countries in Asia, mostly because of the proliferation of counterfeit products, especially collectibles coming out of those countries. Particularly China and Japan.
Fortunately the seller ships internationally and the card has now been marked as "shipped". Unfortunately the estimated delivery date ranges from 04 May to 09 June. Hopefully the card will arrive much sooner, but I tend to doubt it. I have had items come from Canada that took a month or more so getting a shipment literally from the slow boat from China in anything more than a month is wishful thinking.
Overall the cost isn't too much it was $1.99 (opening bid) for the card itself plus $4.99 shipping. The other card's opening bid was also $1.99 opening bid and I won it for $4.90 just under my max bid of $5 bucks. That first card is in the US fortunately and its shipping is only $3.25.
Oh well mistakes happen and this time it gave me a subject I could make a semi-quick blog post about. As an after thought it reminds me some of the times when I have ordered a book on Ebay and not noticed, that the copy is marked as previously being a public library copy. With that though sometimes the sellers are not forthcoming in their listings, they just say it is a used copy. However, there are several book sellers that seem to specialize in reselling library copies. I try to stay away from those because of all the markings and stickers left on the books.
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