Aliexpress - good bad or indifferent?

[Andrew Mawson]

Anyone had experience buying through Aliexpress ?

Do they just act as an agent or actually take responsibility for their goods themselves?

Any informed comments welcomed

Andrew

[Theo Markettos]

Used them a couple of times, once for me and once for work.

It's like ebay - the seller sends the goods themselves, you open disputes with the seller. I never got to find out what the dispute resolution procedure is like as my seller did the right thing when I opened a dispute. But it was obvious the seller was under some pressure to resolve disputes. The standards of English can be an issue too (if you try to write clearly so your message makes sense through automatic translation it probably helps).

One obvious caveat is the distance - my complaint was that they'd sent the wrong number of items, which meant them resending and waiting a while. In the end it turned out they'd sent the original dispatch as two envelopes and the second one arrived two weeks later. It also means sending stuff back is awkward.

One nice thing is there is per-item feedback posted on the site, so you get that feedback which ebay just aggregates together on the seller's profile. That means it's easier to spot the 'bought it, broke within 5 mins' reviews which you wouldn't see on ebay, while the reviews aren't aggregated across all sellers like they are on Amazon (where you don't know who sold it, and often the review is for a completely different model). This is really handy for product details like 'it works on Linux, contains an ABC1234 chip inside'.

So I think I'd happily use it again, though I understand the ways of being scammed less well than I do on ebay and I don't have a statistically valid sample as yet.

Theo (also interested in Taobao shipping agents, a somewhat more complicated place)

[Peter Parry]

They act as a trading venue (a bit like eBay) providing a platform for sellers. I do not think they act as agent for the sellers but they do appear to have an adjudication process for items not received.

[cl]

I use them quite a lot and haven't had any problems. They hold your payment in escrow (don't know if it's *really* escrow but anyway) until you confirm that goods have been received. I've bought small items and things up to Android tablets etc.

[Bob Eager]

How easily is Customs handled?

[Tim Watts]

The usual - aka "it isn't".

So your package goes through China Post and onwards to Royal Mail with the requisite green form stuck on the side. Whether it gets stopped for VAT is entirely random.

[john james]

Yes, used it for 3 transactions so far.

First one went fine. Both of the other two are still pending.

With the second one they have accepted the dispute and my claim for a full refund but I haven't seen the refund yet. This one came with no instructions at all, not even on the web site. Turned out to be easy enough to use, it's a bluetooth neck band headset. The seller did tell me how to turn it on but since this is the 3rd bluetooth neck band headset I have bought now it was easy enough to work it out for myself since it does that the same way the others do. When the seller who sells all sorts of things couldn't tell me what the other two buttons did, even tho its pretty obvious if you know how those usually use those, and hadn't given the small refund they had offered me when then stuffed me around twice on the color which I didn't care about anyway, she said that I needed to raise a dispute to get that and did that and decided to do a try on when she had said that she would need to get on to her supplier about the instructions. Presumably she was told there weren't any.

The third one is another bluetooth neck band headset which never did charge properly and only works for a few minutes after charging. You can see with one of those USB meters that it takes bugger all current for less than a minute and then gives up.

They have agreed to send another one. And asked for the old one back. I told them that it would cost them $13 for me to send it back and got no response to me saying that.

Yes, like ebay.

Not in the sense that amazon does with some stuff.

But the seller doesn't get the money until you tell them that the goods have arrived and work fine.

Not clear what happens if you just lie about that, presumably they do check that you don't say that too often or something and may refuse to sell you stuff if you do it too often.

Much better range than ebay for some things.

Prices can be worse than ebay for some things.

Some quirks with the web site, if you sort by price the number of hits can be only 10% of the number if you use the default sort. Not clear what is happening there.

The communication system with individual transactions is pretty decent, better than ebay in some respects.

I initially had some real reservations about using a card with an operation like that, they don't accept paypal which is what I normally use if its available. But since I have one card which I know is very good about reversing fraudulent transactions and since I keep minimal money in that account so even if the bank does change its policy on that its no more than a minor nuisance, I just used the card and it worked fine.

They do have alipay as an alternative to paypal, but its got nothing like the same level of experience about how secure that is etc. Presumably they don't use paypal because its part of ebay, their competitor and because it has a commission that the seller pays. Its better than paypal in the sense that its effortless to use a card instead of a bank account. Paypal does allow that but its not that obvious how to do that with paypal. I do it like that because it gives me an extra level of security, I can get the bank to reverse the transaction if paypal won't do that.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Paypal only let you do it a small number of times, before they insist you create a paypal account. You get no warning of this, and only find out after you have already committed to buy something. It seems to be a limit per card, so if you switch to a different card, they'll let you make a card payment again, until you do the same with that card too many times.

Card companies usually can't reverse a paypal payment. They see it as a cash transfer to another account, not payment for a product or services. Transfer can only be reversed if the transfer to paypal was fraudulent, and not if anything that happened with the funds after they reached paypal was fraudulent - that would be up to paypal.

[john james]

Sorry, I should have said that more carefully. I was talking about using a card with your paypal account instead of bank account, not the quite separate use of a card with paypal instead of having a paypal account.

And there is no limit on how often you can use a card without getting a paypal account in some jurisdictions, basically those which weren't stupid enough to allow ebay to force you to use paypal.

You get no warning of this,

That isn't right.

They see it

They don't get any option on that when it is payment for a product or service.

And that is the main reason I use paypal instead of a card with operations that I'm not sure will secure the card details properly, fraudulent use.

Paypal says very explicitly indeed that you have the option of getting the card issuer to reverse the transaction if you have valid grounds to do that.

The main reason I prefer to use paypal is because the operation you are paying never sees your card or bank details. So there is only one operation with your card or bank details, paypal, and they haven't been looted yet.

I use the card instead of the bank details with my paypal account so that if a transaction does go wrong, I have more options than if paypal knows my bank account details.

[cl]

I think the only item I have bought that attracted attention from customs was a pair of brake disks for my 'bike. They were delivered anyway and a retrospective demand for VAT arrived later.