Usually if you are dealing with companies with a good reputation you should give them up to about 2 weeks to respond.. I know this seems like very long if you are a first-time buyer, worried about getting scammed and really thinking a lot about getting your laser soon, but you never know when you have hit some really busy days, days of employees being ill, national holidays or anything like that. Especially in China they have holidays at times Westerners do not expect.
There is often also a preferred way, separate for each dealer, to receive inquiries and provide customer services, and therefore you should always try each method of contact if you do not get a reply fairly quick on the first thing you tried, even at the risk of being annoying.
I know Susie prefers instant messaging contact, some shops only respond to special forms sent through their websites while one of the private builders on this forum, IgorT, prefers e-mail and dislikes the forum PM system.
Two weeks of trying each way of contacting the seller, and then you can begin to get worried if there is no reply. Even at this point, you still have plenty of time to contact Paypal, your credit card company or any other secured way in which you have paid to perform a charge-back of your money.
I would recommend first creating a thread such as you have done to wake up the seller if he or she has been lazy or has had trouble with the deadline, then if nothing seems to come out of this and there are not a lot of days left in which to get your money back, open a dispute.. BUT only raise the dispute to a claim as a last resort.
If you make a Paypal claim, you will potentially lock out the seller from all the funds on his/her account, making it impossible for them to do right by you or any of their other buyers.
If there has been some human mistake and the problem is being dealt with at the last moment, it would also be a shame to punish a seller who is not a downright scammer by performing an action which suggest that they have tried to steal your money.
While it is best to wait as long as you can with taking the last steps, it is however important to be able to "read" the seller to some extent if he/she has responded but is giving bad excuses.. sometimes a scammer will make promises leading to the charge-back date being overdue, and him/her being able to take your money and nothing you can do about it.
This stuff is delicate and if you are in doubt, contact others and ask for help.. but here it should also be noted that some people will give bad advice which may harm your choice. Therefore, consult several, knowledgeable people and try to figure out how to combine the best of the advice you were given.
I hope this can help someone in future
Seb
