Is it just me or has AliExpress deteriorated a lot recently?

[Chris Green]

I have just been searching for stuff (pond pumps among other things) on AliExpress and it seems broken in lots of ways. It used to work pretty well for me but now it feels like they have tried to make it very clever and more 'attractive' with dire results. For example:-

It always pops up a 'special' discount coupon every time I go to the site. Occasionally might make sense but every time is just a nuisance.

Most times when I search it now returns no results at all unless I switch away from sort by "Best Match".

Selecting "Free Delivery" mostly doesn't give free delivery (yes, I know it means delivery included in price but it makes total cost more obvious). What you find now is that one item on the page (one you don't want) has free delivery and the rest have relatively expensive delivery.

It would be really handy to know total cost delivered, including VAT, surely this wouldn't be too difficult to provide. eBay manages it when you 'sort by price + p&p'.

Has anyone else noticed the deterioration or is it just me? I used to buy quite a lot of things from AliExpress but now it's just become so painful I rarely bother.

Are there any alternatives? (apart from the obvious eBay and Amazon)

[Theo]

Aliexpress, like Amazon, is pretty adversarial. They do things in the UI that are best for them, not for users. They're also fairly big on tracking/fingerprinting/spying, and their site gets grumpy if you block their tracking. I suspect some of the misbehaviour comes if you're running any anti-tracking in your browser. There are some browser extensions that might smooth some of the annoyances. I haven't tried them.

Banggood, Dealextreme, Gearbest (all a more limited selection, but sometimes European stock which comes faster) DHgate Alibaba (quite a lot of items in quantity 1, although you will have to ask the vendor for a shipping quote - it's not just a 'buy now' button)

Taobao ('Chinese ebay'), Tmall ('Chinese Amazon'): designed for Chinese consumers. You need to go via a proxy to buy as most sellers won't ship internationally.

Theo

[The Natural Philosopher]

I haven't noticed any of that So you run Ublock origin? I do and it seems to crap on most - er - crap

[Andy Burns]

yes, annoying

also annoying, sometimes it shows items that the seller won't ship to UK, but doesn't tell you that right until checkout

banggood, smaller range though.

[Jamesy]

I only get that in the browser, not the phone app.

Never seen that.

Never tried that.

I haven't.

I still use it as much as I used to.

Bangood, but it has nothing like the range.

[Rob Morley]

I've not been using it long, but I found the same behaviour - I'm pretty sure it's the fault of browser security plugins, as a different browser than my usual one works mostly fine. although it still pesters to allow notifications which I have already allowed multiple times just to make the popups go away.

[Rob Morley]

There was a problem that it wouldn't keep me logged in, and kept setting my location to Afghanistan, but that seems to have gone away.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I simply do not recognise any of this behaviour running ali express with Ublock Origin. The experience is painless and simple for me

[Theo]

Yes, and the Brave browser (which has a built in blocker). In particular, things Aliexpress has tried to do:

- make the browser pester to install the Widevine DRM plugin (why? It's not Netflix)

- pester me to accept notifications

- put up a 'voucher' popup, that doesn't give me a voucher

- refuse to search if I'm not logged in

- throw up a slidey CAPTCHA

- fail to sort correctly

- claim there are no items for my search when there clearly are

- sort by price that doesn't include postage

- filter by country doesn't work

- not display VAT in prices, yet know they're shipping to the UK - it mysteriously appears at checkout

Some of these, notably the 'security' related things, are seemingly random and probably because my no-tracking no-persistent-cookies browser has triggered their security/fingerprinting tripwires.

Theo