He claimed he was busy and he'd have it done by the end of the day so we left it and went about our business. When the battery died while I was in India visiting family, my mom went with me to drop it off at a watchmakers to get a battery popped in. ![]() Simple quartz movement in a base metal case - nothing too fancy. I had a Pulsar Chronograph that was the first watch my dad ever gave me. If a watchmaker has two watches that don't work, why not make one that will and use the other leftover pieces to Franken-watch another few watches down the road? And since labor costs are low in India, they can turn quite a profit doing this. As others have mentioned, they are notorious for redialing, repainting, recasing, and also hodge-podging. Called paypal again last week and they were much more helpful this time and agreed to give me a refund, it still hasn't appeared in my account though so I'll have to phone them again and see what's going on.Īlways be careful with used watch purchases coming out of India. ![]() I tried phoning paypal to see if they could help but all they did was tell me to advise the seller to contact them, at this point I emailed him again saying that I'd take the watches.Īnother 8 weeks passes and I haven't got them yet - email again and he says they must have got lost in the post but he'd send me another watch (cheap Indian brand which I didn't want). I also noticed that the seller was no longer listing items on his ebay account so was starting to get concerned. About 6 weeks later I hadn't heard anything so emailed again, he said that had a problem trying to refund me but that the watch was being repaired and he would send it back to me with an extra watch as well. After a couple of days I emailed the seller asking to return the watch for a refund, he replied with an address rather promptly so I sent it back. I bought an old Seiko 5 (described as keeping time perfectly) off an Indian ebay store back in June, when the watch arrived the internals were rattling quite loudly and it would stop working every so often. Seiko's not really picky about allowing companies to be ADs for them- The majority of "mall jewelers" and department stores carry their product, plus most every online watch store it seems like- so the main value in getting gray market for Seiko is getting access to models that are not sold commonly in your country - or more to the point, models that are restricted to specific regions that you don't live in (Japan Domestic being the big one for Seiko.)įar more hassle than it's worth in my experience. For higher end stuff than entry level Seiko the discount can be quite steep. that an AD would be required to do and often sell them at a discount. The gray marketer still makes a profit but doesn't have to spend money on the display cases, promotional materials, etc. These watches are essentially new and overstocked or sourced from countries that don't have the same pricing structure. They might sell to you and me, at some predefined markup, or if a model isn't selling well, they may sell it off into the secondary "gray" market. You have authorized dealers, who have to buy certain amounts of stock to sell. ![]() To answer your other question- gray market is more of a reference to the antiquated way the watch business is marketed. (And if I were doing a higher price search I might not exclude those countries.) The low price franken watches clog up that list to the point of uselessness. That way I can find all the people who start auctions low (be it low in USD, CAD, AUD, GBP, Euro, etc.) and hope that they'll get bid up. I just want to be able to, say, look at vintage watches, "cheapest first", worldwide but ABSOLUTELY EXCLUDE a few specific countries that are known for doing franken watches. I don't mean disparage the Indian watch industry- they actually have several companies that make nice watches and the consumers of watches there are often very enthusiastic. ![]() You might have really good luck, but honestly it's not really where I'd suggest that you start as a beginner.Īlthough it goes far beyond the scope of this in terms of "what I hate about eBay" but the country filtering is really poor. It's very literally a cottage industry and you might have one with a dial that was repainted (badly) by hand or dirt in the mechanism etc. A lot of them are repaired or pieced together and not with the sort of quality control you might hope for.
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