Recent Gmaket shopping experience

My last post on my gmarket shopping experience is back in 2010. Time flies and is 2012 already. Decided to use up my gmarket credit in my account. It is a credit from overcharge shipping. I think this is an area gmarket definitely needs improvment on. I reside in Canada so I am an international shopper in gmarket. No matter if my initial payment was made via credit card or paypal, any over payments WILL NOT be credited back to my initial method of payment. Instead, any over payments will be put as a cash credit on my gmarket account. The only way to withdraw the cash credit is either use it up on the next shopping or bank transfer it to my bank account here in Canada. However, international money transfer will take around 15-30 days and there will be a $35US processing fee. I am not going to pay $35US just to have $50 or $60 trasnfer back to me, so I am kind of force in to leaving it on my account for my next purchase.

This is where the next problem is. For instance, I have $100 cash credit left in my account and I need to make a purchase of $130 of goods, so I guess you guys must of thought that will be an easy process, just use my credit card or paypal to pay the difference. Nope.... two options from here on. You either wire the money to your gmarket account (there is an option in gmarket for you to create a bank account number for you to directly wire the money into), but of course, is going to be expensive any time you transfer money from/to foreign bank account. So that leaves me with the second option, separate my initial order into two different orders. So in my first order, I will tried my very best and get my amount of purchase as close to $100 (my left over gmakret cash credit amount) as possible and that is including shipping charges. On my second order, I will purchase the remaing items and pay with my credit card or paypal and I will have to pay shipping on your second order as well. Lastly, there is an option to combine both orders into the same shippment to save shipping charges. But remember I actually pay shipping charges on each of my both orders? So there will be shipping charges refunded back to my gmarket account as a cash credit. So I am being with what I have in the initially... NICE... which is to be save for next purchase. To me this process is tedious and is just stupid. Gmarket really need to do something about this, Not a lot of people has the patients of going through this just for a supposingly simple online shopping.

After all my complaints, back to my recent shopping experience (finally). I decide to clear out all my gmarket cash credit this time, so I make sure my purchase including shipping is less than or equal to the amount I have on my account. I bought my wife two shirts and the shipping was so fast. I received it within one week. That is speedy delivery!!! I am really impress with this. However, for whatever reason, Canada Boarder decided to tax me on it. My value of goods is approximately $31US and I got taxed 18% on it plus a $8.50 handling charge. I end up paying $18 of duty. I mean wtf, this is a robbery from the custom. That is over 50% of duty. I just have no clue whats going on with the custom, my last order was like 5 times more expensive and no duty fee is required on it...... I think I will send a letter to complain to the custom regarding this, this is just not fair. As for my items, they arrived in excellent condition (please see pictures) and as mention earlier, the shipping time is just great. So quality of the item and the shipping really does deserve a lot of praise.

Overall, I got what I want for a great price on gmarket, depsite the tedious process of payment and the duty fee that I got charged by Canadian custom, I say this shipping experience is good. Despite all the complains about gmarket and the duty fee that I got charged, I will still continue to shop on gmarket.

My Gmarket shopping experience

Recently heard of a Korea base shopping website name Gmarket. It is similar to Ebay, but obviously you are shopping from sellers base in Korea. So how it works is you make your purchase from different sellers, the sellers will then ship the products to Gmarket warehouse in Korea. Once all the items has arrived to Gmarket warehouse, it will then be shipped overseas in a combine shipment. A very cost effective way to save on shipping charges.

So me and my girl friend decided to make our first purchase from Gmarket and we went all-in. Initially, we plan to shop for a few clothing's and obviously we shop way more than we intended to in the first place. At the end, we bought around 25 pieces of clothing's combined, plus some other products. We end up buying 30 items in total from Gmarket. The cost including overseas shipping to where I live (Canada) works out to be around $10-$15 cdn/item. Thats a great deal for Korean made clothing's and items. These products can easily cost five times more if I was to purchase it in Hong Kong.

The shipping services from Gmarket is speedy. My package was ship as EMS and arrived from Korea to Canada in 3 days at most. However, thanks to our "speedy" customs, it was held for approx. 4 extra days before it gets release to Canada Post for delivery.

The long waited day has finally arrived when I receive the package from Canada Post today. When I open it up, everything is as advertised. I am really really happy with my shopping experience with Gmarket. If I have to list something negative about Gmarket, is the way it refund its shipping charges. When you made a purchase on your items, the shipping cost will be charged base on an estimated weight of the item and you can pay this by visa or paypal. However, the estimate weight is no where near the actual weight. My package is estimated to be around 26kg, but the actual is only 12kg. So i paid almost a double on shipping charges. I made my purchase with Visa, but Gmarket will not refund the shipping charge to my visa, instead it is refund as a credit in my Gmarket account. I can cash it out and transfer to money to my bank account in Canada, but since it is an overseas account, there will be a $35us service charge. How lame. I guess I will use the credit on my next Gmarket purchase. Even though I don't like the way they refund the shipping charges, I will still refer Gmarket to people that I know. The clothing's are really cheap in price but good in quality.

The following are some of the photos that I took when I open the package today.