Reduce the Risk When Buying Lifepo4 From Alibaba! This Is What I Have Learned.

hi y'all i have been looking forward to this video for some time i am going to talk today about buying lithium iron phosphate cells from chinese suppliers through alibaba what i believe to be the most difficult and scary part of this entire journey there's a lot of risk involved and it's very difficult to know who you're dealing with i have worked with three different suppliers have vastly different experiences with those three suppliers at the end of this video i'm going to tell you which one i prefer and will use in the future when i started this journey i knew i was going to be buying a lot of these cells at the at first it was going to be 132 cells i later added more to it so this first purchase was for 132 280 amp hour lithium iron phosphate prismatic cells and i sent a request for quote to alibaba and i got about 10 responses from different suppliers all of them sounded very similar oh dear [Music] dear raymond dear ray you all we have the best and it was uh i'm a skeptical person when it comes to these things but oh my god i wanted to believe what these people said they had so many promises everyone had grade a cells everyone had new cells everyone had anything i wanted to make this sale happen and some of them were obviously phony they had different prices some of them didn't have the cells that i wanted had other cells and i boiled it down to four different suppliers i'm going to show you three of them today because these are the three suppliers that i actually did business with so far but this is a breakdown of the three suppliers that gave me quotes that i entertained for this first purchase this first one is winnie wong with gideon technology and that's who i ended up purchasing these cells from when you look at the amp hour price per amp hour of these cells she came in at the lowest price and she made all the right promises and everything was going to be great i will tell you right now winnie wong never told me the truth once everything she told me over the course of months and page after page after page of messages back and forth every single thing she told me proved to be a lie so let's just get that out of the way another supplier i was interested in using was jenny wu but jenny wu with dokon technology only had 302 amp hour cells and the price was a little bit higher and i entertained it it it it seemed like a pretty decent deal but i in the end went with winnie wong the third supplier was amy wan and if you go to the do-it-yourself solar forum you'll know that amy juan is one of the darlings of that forum a lot of people buy their cells from them and although there are problems from time to time and people get really antsy because their cells don't show up when they're supposed to in the end it has always worked out and that's why she's one of the trusted suppliers on the do-it-yourself solar forum the problem with amy one is that you pay for that 52 cents per amp hour so that's 20 percent more than buying the cells from winnie wong and that's a lot to make up for so in the end i chose to go with winnie wong and here's what happened what i received was not 280 amp hour cells i received cattle 271 amp hour cells winnie wong later told me well we just call them 280 amp cells that's what everybody does well it's not what everybody does so what i've learned in my career is that there are companies that have a culture and a culture of it can have a culture of integrity a culture of hard work it can have a culture of trying to put a fast one over on all the clients i've been blessed to work for a company for decades that always has operated with integrity and you there is no way to get past our reputation for honesty it has served us well this salesperson winnie wong is a liar i hate to use that word but there's no way around it she's a liar she just lies everything she says and it turns out her company has a culture of mistreating their customers and they don't care you can't get to them they're in china they're sending you these cells and you can't do much about it the prices i showed you on the first page all include shipping and all include a three percent credit card fee because if these sales just simply don't show up alibaba is not going to support you you can pay alibaba to for their assurance program but they are always going to support the seller your best bet is to put it on a credit card pay the three percent and if everything went completely to the dogs this credit card company will back you up but this is a different issue i paid for 280 amp hour new grade a cells what i received were non-uniform cells they came from many different batches they all look different half of them many many were obviously used dirty you could tell that they were old some looked newer many didn't even meet the spec for 271 amp hour cells now new cells should test about 5 amp hours or more higher than their rated capacity when they first get tested as new cells for the first several cycles at least if a cell is being is testing at 261 amp hours and it's supposed to be 271 amp hours that is a used cell or a grade b there is something wrong with that cell and some of the cells that i received were like that and what i believe is that these companies they buy these cells from wherever they can get them and they gather up batches of these cells and the guy in the warehouse has this batch that he knows are terrible and this batch he knows are used and this batch was a little bit better they're new but they just didn't pass the testing that was required to use them in the chinese electric vehicle industry and so he's got all these things and when he gets an order for 132 cells he just grabs a few of these and a few of these and a few of these and a few of these when i got these batches they came in boxes of four and on the side of each box was a number which i quickly determined was their indication of what the amp hour capacity of the cells were some said 280 some said 270 some said 268 they weren't actually accurate but they were vaguely accurate the 280s were going to be more than the ones that said 268 but they weren't actually accurate the half of the cells had the qr codes covered the other half i don't know if the q heart qr codes were legitimate or not when he wong said well we just put our own qr code this was later of course not when i was buying the cells but later she said we just put our own qr codes because you can't trust the qr codes that come on those cells so we just put our own on oh lord i was supposed to receive two bus bars per cell and i received half the number of bus bars and the bus bars i received turned out to be brass bus bars they're unusable for this kind of amp hour draw on a cell they're unusable so if you remember cost per amp hour for the cells from winnie wong was supposed to be 41 cents per amp hour after testing the cells the price per amp hour capacity was actually 43 cents per amp hour now that's that's less than promised if the sales had been new then it would not have been 41 amp 41 cents per amp hour it would have been about 39 or 40 cents per input probably 39 cents per new cells would would test higher than the rated capacity not only did i not get the rated capacity but i didn't even get the cells that i was promised so that's my experience with this company they lied when i when i told them that what i'd gotten wasn't true they basically said well what do you want to do about it and i said well you need to sell me send me copper bus bars in the amount that you were supposed to send and you need to compensate me for not supplying me with the with what you promised and she said how about we send you the copper bus bars this took forever to even get her to understand what copper bus bars were there's a time factor in here that makes this really i would never deal with this company again how about we send you the bus bars that's going to cost us 300 and we'll give you 500 for the cells and i said how about this send me the copper bus bars and a thousand dollars oh no that's too much we don't make a lot of money on these cells i said okay we'll do the bus bars and 500. and she comes back and says my boss won't do 500 just the bus bars nothing she ever told me proved to be true and all the stories you hear about oh my boss will kill me oh you're it's the warehouse guy that does that created the problem it's not me it goes on and on and on it i would never do this again but i did get cells out of the deal which i can use these aren't them these cells look new oh because these cells came from a different supplier let's move on i then decided to up the capacity of our systems and i decided to buy 70 more cells and i decided this time because i wanted to diversify my risk so okay amy 1 is more expensive but more trustworthy winnie wong let's diversify the risk i had not tested all the cells from winnie wong yet i didn't know how bad the lies were going to be but i decided to place a second order with amy wan even though i knew i mean there's different ways of getting ripped off and one of them is just to overpay in the first place where you're willingly paying more than you should well that's what i decided to do i decided to order the second batch from amy one here's the price i paid for 70 sells and the price per cell with shipping and the credit card fee ended up being 150 each and that came to 54 cents per amp hour i received 70 new pristine looking cells that were very well packaged everything i was promised proved to be true amy one never lied to me but her forwarder was terrible once the cells got to the warehouse they they cleared customs and they sat in a warehouse in california for a month after that before they got transferred to a ups truck sorry a fedex drug and eventually i received them i tested the cells they all tested at higher than rated capacity the average test that i got was 284.6 amp hours that is typical of new cells being tested at a 0.2 c rate and so the cost per amp hour ended up being 53 cents not 54 cents but still 53 cents per amp hour is a very high price so i got what i ordered but i overpaid it's i'm looking for the goldilocks solution there should be a solution where you can get a trustworthy supplier and not overpay so i was building the solar generator and i was waiting for cells and jenny wu stood out to me because jenny wu never pressured me the way the others did oh you must decide today oh jenny wu just acted as if she wanted to be helpful and and provide me with a product and she then told me well we have a supply of cells in houston well she said in the u.s and i asked her where and she said in houston well i'm in texas i can drive to houston i'm going to be in houston two weeks from now so i said well i've already ordered the cells but i'll buy four cells and see how it works out and she said the cells you want because i decided i would get the 302 amp hour cells the cells you want we don't have them yet they're on the water and they'll be there soon i said okay let me know when they arrive she said we sell them quickly if you want to make sure you get them you should pre-pay for them and then we'll send them to you or will contact you when they arrive but you'll already have them they won't get sold out from underneath you because i'm not the only salesman that sells these cells for my company oh my goodness well okay i'll just do it she seems trustworthy they all do but this one this person has never lied to me so far that i've been able to discover and so i paid and she contacted me and she said they have arrived it was about two weeks later and i was going to be in houston that weekend so on a saturday i showed up at their warehouse big huge shipping container out front full of cells warehouse full of cells and about that same time a thread was put on the do-it-yourself solar forum about this company that had a warehouse in texas coincidental because i had already paid for the sales from this company but i found that the people at the warehouse were very kind to me they were very accommodating and i went in and the cells looked brand new and i went and tested these cells now the cells i purchased ended up being 46 cents per amp hour because they are a higher amp hour the cost per cell including tax getting them to the houston warehouse and paying for them with a credit card was a hundred and thirty nine dollars per cell but they were 302 amp hour cells so it came to 46 cents per amp hour but when i tested the cells they did not test at 302 amp hours the average test on these four cells was 311 amp hours which brings the price down to 45 cents per amp hour and these cells looked pristine they measured pristine and i don't mean they measured the voltage when you get them that means nothing they measure the capacity measured well the internal resistance measured well they all weighed the same and so there was a minimal wait time and when i put them into a four cit 4s battery and ran it up and down to test the capacity it worked really well they worked really well together so that was a great experience and she communicated with me regularly and she never pressured me even when she was telling me it's your decision but if you purchase now before the cells get there then you won't have to worry about losing your place in line to get the cells and it all worked out exactly like she said well i decided to up my capacity one more time and this time decided to buy 64 cells i knew i wasn't going to work with winnie wong and i knew i wasn't going to work with amy one because i got taken advantage of in different ways by both of them now amy 1 was completely honest and upfront i just overpaid for that honesty so last purchase i purchased now the price let me say before we start at this point time has passed the price has gone up for shipping the price the delay for shipping has gone up and the price for the sales has gone up from all of the suppliers i could no longer get yeah i'm gonna have to go back a little bit i could no longer get the sells from winnie wong for the 94 dollars per cell that she promised which ends up being 115 after shipping and credit card fees so so one of the things that they did and this is really i guess the most important thing when you buy these cells they come to you without the proper documentation on the box you're not gonna get from amy one or anyone a label on the side of the box that says it has lithium batteries in it and if you did you would pay a lot more for the cells and they know that if you don't like what they send you if it's damaged has dents the studs are broken they can pretty much do whatever they want with you based on their level of integrity because if your credit card company says okay we'll we'll refund you but you have to send the cells back to the supplier the cost for you to send those cells back to china in a legitimate and legal fashion will be most of the cost of the cells you're just not going to do it now if they have a u.s warehouse the credit card company is going to accept you sending those cells to the u.s warehouse so working with a supplier that has a u.s warehouse in case something goes wrong that can be helpful working with an honest supplier is more important and what when he wong said in the end after lots of back and forth with alibaba where they always want to tell you just work it out with your supplier is okay we'll take them back you can send them to this u.s warehouse that we have which she never told me about in the first place because the cost of the sales has gone up and we can resell them for more than we sold them to you for and you paid for the shipping to get them to the us so we'll make a lot of money on the deal oh that may be the only thing that winnie wong told me that was the truth is you're stuck dude we're not going to fix your problem we don't care and we can make money on them again if you return them it just doesn't matter to us there's a lot of demand and we don't have to give you what we promised you last sale 64 cells ordered them from jenny wu she was very good to work with through the whole process i've communicated with her many times and this sale ended up being from china i decided to save money by going to china and waiting ended up being 125 dollars per cell it would have been less if i had purchased them earlier in the transaction before prices went up but it ended up being 45 cents per amp hour everything she has ever told me has proven to be true even the things that didn't seem like they might be they all ended up being true i have not received these cells yet they are i have not received these cells yet these cells are on the water between china and long beach and they will be received according to the shipper january 10th in long beach and then we'll see i'll probably get them first part of february but the cost is 45 cents per amp per promised amp hour and if if what i guess is true they will test slightly above their rated capacity and the final price per amp hour will be 44 cents per amp hour and she has sent me pictures and videos of all the cells in the boxes ready for the boxes to be closed up and she has continually updated me on the progress i if i get these cells and they test as i suspect they will be 44 cents per amp hour at a time when cells were less expensive i paid 43 cents per amp hour from winnie wong and i got used cells i got a batch of mixed mismatched batch of cells it was a complete mess to work through and in the end they gave me a hundred dollars in compensation for having ripped me off which she said came out of her pocket and she would send it to and the number of lies that went around that were just i can't go any further with that because it's just too much time to document with for you how many ways she ripped me off i would definitely purchase from jenny wu in the future now this channel has never been about making money and so that's why you never see affiliate links you never see uh here's where to buy these parts on amazon and i make money on every purchase and i i don't begrudge the people that do that i do have a problem with credibility when someone says i tested this battery well it's not exactly what they promised but it's still a good battery and if you want to buy it you can buy it down below and they make 5 to 8 on the purchase of every battery that they review okay i have a problem my skeptical nature has a problem believing everything that's said by somebody who's making money on the product that they're reviewing because they become salespeople two days ago somebody asked me where did you get your cells and at the time that they asked me that question i was in a chat with jenny wu and they the the subscriber said i need to buy 16 more cells and i texted to jenny wu and said want to sell 16 cells and of course she does she works literally 16 hours a day if you look on the thread that she interacts with on the do-it-yourself solar form and you do the time zones you will find that she wakes up in the middle of the night goes online answers questions and then goes back to sleep she works all the time well i asked her if she wanted to sell 16 cells she said i i should work out something so that you can make a small commission i'm at lunch let me talk to my boss well i don't know about that because i really want my viewers to be able to trust everything i say and as soon as i start selling is that still going to be true she came back a little later and said i talked to my boss and he will offer you a small commission for anyone who uses my link and mentions the name of your channel okay y'all i'm gonna put the link i would have put the link for jenny wu at the end of this video before any of that happened and if you use that link and you mention in the communication to her my channel and if you have not already done business with her company i will make a small commission on the sale you don't have to do that this channel is about sharing the knowledge that i gain please subscribe i need to up the numbers on the channel because i want to get this information out to more people if you need to buy sales and you use that link and you use the name of my channel i will make a small commission don't feel obligated to do that do what you're comfortable with but if you need to buy cells i'm comfortable recommending jenny wu and dokon technology because they have never lied to me that's all for this video we got more coming thank you for your patience i hope this helps you this is a scary part of this whole process and i hope this helps you to get what you need to make your project happen bye bye y'all

Channel: Ray Builds Cool Stuff

Views: 214,088

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Id: EYqemUdIo08

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 31 2021