I buy items from AliExpress all the time. Mostly electronics, but occasionally things like tessa tape, vehicle covers, motorcycle parts, and other random shit. Never had an issue.
I’ve used aliexpress for bootleg lego and have had mixed results. Some sets were perfect copies with all pieces, and others were missing some. I was also able to get some discontinued sets which was nice. The quality of the pieces themselves were pretty good. It is a bit of a risk but hard to beat the price as its wayyyy cheaper.
I mostly buy parts for my woodworking shop at home from Ali. A benchdog is a benchdog and they are absolutely the same to what you get at Amazon,etc. And they are literally 1/3 of the price here even if you add shipping and customs. So if one is truely shit I couldn’t care less.
So far I had no bad experiences really - one shipment was missing a 2 bucks piece but I can live with that. Some things actually surprised me as the quality I got was better than expected.
Electronic wise I bought a Qotom mini PC from them years ago (directly from the Qotom shop) which still works as my UTM.
I buy my body jewelry, earrings etc on AliExpress. Also buying Zirconia jewelry and gold plated works very well since there are hardly any premium charges. it’s also pretty much the only area of goods I’ve found where in 98,9% of the cases the product and materials used is exactly as advertised, meaning no oxidizing, radiation and magnet friendly, etc.
Be aware chinese jewelry might contain metals or alloys that differ from the description and which are bad for your skin/health. And a lot of jewelry sold in the West is from China.
I got a really good Glock 18 style electric water pistol off Aliexpress for this summer, at half the price they were being hawked for on Amazon. It even comes with a drum magazine- it was great for a music festival I went to recently!
Keep in mind that a lot of your local marketplace sellers just order rebadged stuff from alibaba. I’ve found literally the same electronics i’ve bought locally on aliexpress for like half the price.
I’ve bought from aliexpress in the past for obscure electronics that you can’t really get anywhere else for a good price. But I will never shop at temu, I am incredibly suspicious about how they have such an incredibly large advertising budget yet their prices are so low. Either it’s a straight up scam or they are expecting to make a lot of money later down the line
I bought an intel i7-5775c for like £70 about 2 and a half years ago from Aliexpress. Really strong cpu for the price, overclocks well and has meant that I haven’t had to upgrade my motherboard and ram to ddr4 yet.
Some arts supplies are good. I'm very poor and I hate consumerism, but I can't really afford the good stuff so I sometimes resort to stuff like this. They do good acrylic markers and have a huge pack of normal markers that's also really decent.
There are some nice stuff of Ali that was original intended for the Chinese market. But you have to know you get what you pay for in China. If it’s too cheap, it’s going to be crap.
I use AliExpress for electrical parts (except anything with memory), 3D printer parts, and small crap I don't mind waiting for, but never anything I would be angry about if it never arrived. Also, nothing I consume or wear or need for safety, and I'm wary of anything that's supposed to be plugged into the wall for long periods of time unattended.
I wouldn't say I've been surprised, but my expectations are low. It's all cheap stuff, but as long as you're not needing the stuff you buy, it's fine. Dollar store quality with the scent of plastic and cigarettes.
That being said, beware of scams. The one that seems acceptable to them is to list one cheap part for the listing, along with variations of the full device. That way it looks like the lowest price in search results, but when you click it, the selected variation is the cheap part. Like, you'll search for "pliers set" and see a listing for $1, compared to others around $15. When you select it, the product page will have a carrying case for $1 and the various pliers for twice as much as the competition. What's better is that the case will be selected automatically, not the thing in the picture you clicked on or the picture you see first in the product pages' gallery.
There are also scam stores that pop up with super low prices compared to others on the site can disappear overnight and the cancellation/refund process is a super pain. Contact customer service once and just submit a claim with your CC company. Their refund process will try to keep telling you to wait for another week, and that includes the reps you get on chat. If you're suspicious and still order, always follow the shipping info. They will estimate a reasonable delivery date, you'll get a shipping notification, but it will sit in limbo. The shipping folks are separate from the scammers, so if you see the package actually move towards a shipping center, you're in the clear. If it says they received shipping information for over a week, you got screwed.
Ignore flash drives/SSDs, batteries, and assume any flashlights are 1/100th the brightness claimed (literally). Oh, and watch shipping costs. Something with free shipping can be 10x the price of the product if you add a second one to your cart.
True. They created their own problem by trying to up each other's lumens claims over and over to the point where decent flashlights are claimed to have 5.6 million lumens and included 25000mAh 18650s.
Most of the $5+ flashlights are probably fine for most people's needs. I have several and they've been fine for me. Different models, similar modes, similar brightness, and all fine for walking the dog or if the power goes out. Now, if I were relying on them for survival, I might think twice. All have held up fine, including the 12 year old one from dealextreme (pre-alibaba). But, since I don't know if people are asking for recommendations where spec accuracy matters, I'm hesitant to recommend them to random people on the internet.
(I had to check, just for fun, and there are 18650 batteries listed as 19900mAh. Pretty impressive, since Panasonic is capped out at 3500-3600.)
The one that seems acceptable to them is to list one cheap part for the listing, along with variations of the full device. That way it looks like the lowest price in search results, but when you click it, the selected variation is the cheap part.
This practice is so widespread on Ali that finding the best price/seller that is likely to get the item to you balance is ridiculously time consuming, a lot of the time the cheap item is something barely related to the item you’re searching for. It also seems to be creeping into Amazon at the moment!
Yeah, it really caught me off guard the first time I used the site. It was during one of those special celebration discount days where they had the audacity to mark items as literally $0.01 when basically nothing was that price.
For 3D printer filament, which is usually bought in 1kg/2.2lb spools, most places list a 2m sample or a 250g spool to game the search. And my other favorite is the whack-a-mole shipping setup where on variation might be free shipping, but choose a different color and the shipping jumps to $300+.
With Amazon, I'm seeing a ton more overpriced items discounted to still higher priced than their competition. If you look at their deals pages, you can find things like portable monitors for $70 (down from $150), but checking that category shows the same monitor (same specs under a different name) for $60.
Here's as close as I can find right now, since all the lightning deals are ending for the day. There's a USB laptop docking station that's "discounted" from $139 to $70. There isn't an exact match (there usually is), but similar products go for ~$60-$70 (2 HDMI, 4+ USB3 ports, 100W PD, ethernet). What's funnier is that the specific company's Amazon site has at least 4 identical docks at slightly different prices.
I got a decent little fanless i5-based computer with 6 ethernet ports to use as a router, and it was cheap and works well running OPNsense. That’s about the only thing I’ve bought on AliExpress.
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