As @SamsaSpoon and @EspritDeLaNature may recall, I've been on a bit of a mission to suss out what the best hand extruder is. Not long ago, I found out about a site called SuperBuy that will buy items in China for you, warehouse them for up to 90 days, and then ship them to you when you're ready. They even have a service whereby the SuperBuy staff can help you find products which may be difficult to find if you don't speak Chinese. You can also look through the inventory of various Chinese retailers on the site using automatic translation. There are a ton of incense related things, but oddly, a lot of it seems to be geared towards making pressed incense beads and seals: something I didn't know existed.
As I've been unable to find different tip sizes for my extruder since I ordered it, I thought I'd risk taking a chance on SuperBuy. At the beginning of the month, I placed an order for an incense making kit that includes an extruder with a bunch of tips, as well as some extra tips for good measure. The product was listed for sale on 1688, which is a Chinese site serving the domestic market only. Here's how the process worked:
- I bought the item from SuperBuy.
- The item was shipped from the retailer to the SuperBuy Guangdong Warehouse.
- When the item arrived, the SuperBuy team unpackaged and photographed everything. Some examples:
- I chose the option to keep the original packaging and paid a pittance for them to bubble wrap it. The packaging was excellent, and everything arrived in good nick, but I don't know that I would do this again as they literally wrapped the shipping box from the original seller, so the size of the parcel was very much more than it could have been.
- I then selected all of the items I had in the warehouse and asked them to package them up together and send them to me. At this point I had to choose a shipping line; they had many options. Unfortunately, the shipping was very expensive due to the size and weight of my parcel, and probably the tariff situation. I'd recommend using the shipping cost calculator on their website before committing to a purchase.
- Everything arrived today!
So, it wasn't a scam after all! There are also a bunch of incense ingredients available on the site; no idea what the quality is like. So not the cheapest option, at least for me in this case, but SuperBuy seems like a decent way to get your hands on things that even the likes of Alibaba and Aliexpress don't have available in your country.