Egyptian cotton sheet sets on eBay are so cheap. How come yours are so much more expensive?

Hi, I was searching the web for some bed sheets, just plain white sheets, and I was blown away by the pricing and thread counts on eBay. They have 1000tc and 1200tc sheets for less than $50, but yours are twice that much. How is that possible? Are their sheet sets reasonable, or just cheap?

Wow. That raises a lot of issues. First, I want to say that I love eBay. I’ve bought and sold a lot of stuff there. But now that disclaimer is out of the way, here is the pseudo-dirt.

I’ve wondered the same thing as you. Our company manufactures and imports bedding, so how are resellers and stay-at-home-moms on eBay able to beat us on pricing? So I bought sheets from several different sellers on eBay and the mystery quickly “unraveled.”

Sellers there are re-labeling (if that’s not a term, it is a practice). They take the 200tc or 300tc label out of a package and insert a 600tc, 800tc, or 1000tc label. I actually sent 1 sheet set to a lab to have the thread count tested to confirm my assumption. At several $hundred$ per test, that’s as much confirmation as I felt like getting.

You can’t really tell the difference in the feel of a 300tc fabric and a 1200tc fabric, but the weight of the sheet set is a dead give away. We've handled a lot of bed sheets sets from different suppliers, and their weight is very similar. A queen 1200tc sheet set weighs about 8-9 pounds, while a queen 300tc sheet set weighs only 4-5 pounds, and a queen 600tc sheet set weighs about 6-7 pounds.

Re-labeling is just plain wrong, that’s for sure. But it’s more of a bad joke than an injustice. Prices for 1000tc sheets on eBay have plummeted from a fair price for an actual 1000 sheet set 2 years ago, then dropped to a fair price for a 600tc set, and now is a fair price for a 300tc set. So you pay for a 300tc sheet set and you get a 300tc sheet set. You just think you’ve got a 1000tc sheet set.

We've written a lot more about  bed sheets here.  In particular, we've written about the quality of multi ply threads in Egyptian cotton sheets. I think you will find this article interesting and helpful.