Although it would appear that all shopping online will save you money I can assure you outright it most certainly wont. Partial to spending as little as i have on website purchases i stray away from the hard hitters like amazon and ebay. For one simple reason the majority of electrical goodies listed come from China direction. That’s not the problem so much as the markups the impose upon the uninitiated. Why spend €4.99 plus shipping for a buck converter when the same one from china is like 1 euro shipped. You want me to show you an example? Ok so.
Here is an example of Amazon selling a buck converter
So whats the problem? Well a few problems, shipping can be slow from China, quality of copied branded units (knock offs) can be hit and miss. i can think of an imax charger original and copy and the original has far better components in it.
With that said, sometimes more often than not the Chinese manufacturers will copy themselves and make things as cheap as possible, on a website it may look fantastic but in your hand is a different story. One might be shocked at some of the build quality.
In my last blog i wrote about lasers and id like to bring your attention to diode lasers, they generally are cheaper than co2 lasers and fibre lasers as they have no moving parts fancy mirrors or magic gasses or liquids to drive the prices up.
You might as so what if china makes cheaper lasers, well truth is they skimp on fans for cooling, wiring thickness, powering options, quality of lenses, of the heatsinks that passively suck the heat away from the diodes. I can go on but whats the point you get the idea.
But from reputable companies, pay a little bit more get great service, great product and use it and enjoy it. What do you think?