G'day... I usually don't get involved in this type of thing too much, but I do feel that my input here would add value.
I just recently purchased some goods from someone very similar to yourself off the forum's, and by the end of the deal I felt like a nagging mother.
I ordered:
FMIC
Air Pod
Turbo back Exhaust
ECU
Boost controller
All of this totally to around $6,000 in parts, which for me is quite a sizeable sum of money. Probably the most money I have spent on one singular thing, besides a car.
I was quoted as receiving the stuff in 10 days. As it turned out, I ended up waiting close to 4 months for all of my parts to arrive. Granted the exhaust was quite difficult to ship, it did not explain how the catalytic convertor that I was instructed to pick up from a garage in Manly was custom made not 1 hour before I arrived when the cat was received supposedly nearly 2 months prior to the day.
So after calling up the person in question every few days with them promising to call me back (never a call back), E-mailing and hardly receiving a response by the end of it I felt like an annoying customer. In the reality I was promised goods and a service that was incredibily below pay for ANY industry.
All in all, I have heard through the grape vine of the reasons for a lot of these troubles with receiving goods, and so the word is that the person in question received my $6k and spent it on other goods for customers who had been on the backlog longer than myself. So that's when the waiting started. My parts were finally ordered from Japan when more people placed their orders and gave him the money. somewhat like a pyramid scam, from what I hear.
All in all, I suggest to anyone thinking about purchasing parts from places like forums need to be extremely careful about who they go through. It comes down to how good your suppliers word is, and if they make promises they cannot deliver then it's imperrative to do something about it. I have learnt from my mistakes and intend on meeting more people and discussing my purchases and who to purchase them through prior to any further transactions I make.
Now I am intentionally not mentioning any names in this thread, but if you are curious as to who in the forum's would sell parts and give this type of service and want to stick clear of them, then feel free to pm me..
No worries...
Giles...