the mini pc chronicles

...or, how to not get scammed when ordering from china

a 5 min read

hello readers !! recently i was making a blog post that goes into my new homelab setup, what i’m running, and just software i really appreciate, just to have a place where it’s all documented on the internet & to potentially inspire others to show them what’s useful to me personally.

when making this blog post, i wanted to go into the story of how chaotic it was to get my machine in the first place - but upon writing that, i realized it’s way too convoluted of a story and was deserving of it’s own blog post, so now we’re here!

attempting to get a machine

so getting this machine in the first place was a nightmare of sorts.

a good friend of mine recommended me this mini pc - as she had purchased the same one from them and had a pretty good experience.

i followed in her lead and purchased one on august 2nd (keep that in mind), for the steep price of $319.99.

a while went by, and i hadn’t gotten any updates, the mini pc was supposedly still in their warehouse. on monday, august 11 (10 days after purchase), i sent them an email being like,

Hello! I would like to ask if you know anything about my order. It’s been processing for some time now and I just want to know if there’s any known delays going on?

I’ve read all of the pages on the site and it claims the company processes orders with 1-3 business days, but mine is still “awaiting shipment” since the 2nd of August. I assume this means it’s still processing.

this situation was pretty unusual and i wasn’t particularly happy about the money i had just spent. so i waited and i waited, two days later the package supposedly shipped (yay..? not quite.) on the 13th of august (wednesday - & still no response from them, btw.) DHL had started holding the package hostage unless i pay a total of $50.21 for the shipment…

this would bring the total up to $370.20 for the mini pc itself - which is WAY out of my budget.

let’s commit customs fraud !

i did some snooping around the dhl site, you know, as one does. and i stumbled across this:

this pricing is very off 😭 they are committing customs fraud by declaring it as 48.75% of it’s original value.

i understand this is likely done in good spirit, but it sure does not help with the already existing shadiness this company has presented towards me.

now back to the plot

i waited 1-2 days to see if this would go away, to no avail. so i waited a few more days, no response still, then on thursday the 14th (around 11 pm est) i had submitted a dispute through paypal. because this is just ridiculous, and i’d rather have a full refund. mind you, there wasn’t a cancel button on their site either - really weird behavior. if there was a cancel button, i 100% would’ve just used that instead of disputing it through paypal.

on friday the 15th, around 9 pm EST - i had received an email from the infamous gmktec themselves, stating the following:

this is obviously a load of bull crap, and was genuinely a really funny message to read 😭 me and a few friends laughed about it for a while. because, i do not trust them to reimburse me, it is so easy for them to just run away. (also, the whole point in not paying the fee to begin with was because i wasn’t spending $370 on a $320 machine, i just did not have the budget for that..)

mind you, if they were more transparent about the customs fees, or bumped the price of the mini pc to account for it, i would not have had as big of an issue here. but they explicitly keep the price lower and shove you with the customs fees last minute, which is just really crappy behavior. so at this rate, i just progress with the paypal dispute and go on about my life, like the situation is screwed enough and i didn’t really see it going through properly.

then, 14 days later, i get this email

????

the paypal dispute sat dormant with no updates, and i had not received any more contact from the company (nor have i replied to them - we really just went our own separate ways). so this really confused me.

2 hours later, it arrived at my doorstep.

i was half expecting them to force the fee at the door, like some people have spoken about, but no? they just dropped off the package and left (???).

my next theory was that, surely this box has to filled with rocks or something. and i started remembering this message from a friend regarding the situation:

but surely enough, the box contained the mini pc i had ordered essentially a month ago.

i unboxed it, set it up using a bare metal ubuntu server installation for testing, and what would you know, everything functioned perfectly. i had all the storage, all the ram, and the cpu ran pretty fine too.

after doing all of the testing, i decided to cancel the paypal dispute as i had eventually got the product and it worked as described - just felt weird keeping it open.

that concludes the mini pc chronicles, thank you so much for reading !!

keep an eye out for the post where i describe everything i’ve hosted on this, i’ll add it to the bottom of this post when it’s published <3