I prefer eBay at least it’s cheaper and the sellers care about reputation

With ebay the delivery time for small items is measured in months or >= 200% of the product cost, and you either have to deal with gsp and the shit delivery they use or with DHL's insanely costly customs clearance. Probably only worth it if you live in the US.

Ebay is not the best for dropshipped Chinese crap. It's markedly better for about anything else.

If you buy from china, it’s going to take weeks. If you buy from US and live in Canada, you’re going to pay a lot of customs.

In 2007, I bought a used MacBook on Ebay for $870, with shipping it was about $900. That was back when the currency was on parity.

It arrived with $300 custom fees. I could have bought a new one at that price.

If you pay about 5-10% more you can get it from a us based drop shipper. Obviously if you buy it from china you might as well get it from aliexpress

At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.

Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.

(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)

The problem with AliExpress is that you'll get a tip about time X, you click the link and the link is dead. You then search for thing X. You get about 1000 results of X from different sellers, most of them crap imitations and some of them even from stores that copy the name of former store of product X. All of the product pages look identical.

One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.

Amusingly: when it comes to clones of very fancy western knives, all these problems go away because those duplicates are largely all from the same factory, and there’s even premium cloning brands which have duplicate store fronts

This is true of a lot of product types, but there is often a QC process that happens for the "premier" name brand that they were manufactured for. And these "duplicates" are frequently the irregulars that didn't make the cut.

In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly.

This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.

What kind of knives are we talking about?

I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.

It’s more clones of 200-400-800 dollar stuff for 40-100 dollars. They’re in many cases definitely made by a different place than the oem because they based their design on public stuff online image and specs wise then made their own tweeks. Usually slightly different geometry, often one of d2, 8cr, 9cr, vg10, 154cm or m390, with first 5 usually being honest labels. (The vendors say mark foo when it’s just visual blade print label. ). There’s def some instances where the clones also actually have design tweeks that make them competitive or better than the originals in fit and finish.

Afiact, the Main good vendors are green thorn, lemifshe and jufule currently. But if you ask the vendors detailed questions before spending money they seem pretty honest.

As for a blade steel breaking, that should be less likely with Chinese blade heat treats since they all tends to err on the side of undershooting hardness and cap out at 60hrc. So in many cases way less brittle than a western heat treat if it’s the same steel

> At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.

Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.

Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."

Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."

In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.

I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?

> I’ve never bought from AliExpress, but I’m pretty sure everyone does this. Customers are mostly looking for product reviews, not reviews on sellers. For example, take a mouse from Logitech. Even if five sellers sell the product, it’s better to show product reviews for every item. Isn’t that so?

I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and, unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if the platform can identify the counterfeits, then it should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly mingled reviews.)

This doesn't work unless you have someone verifying that products from both sellers are identical. Seller A could be selling real logitech gear and seller B could be selling clones, as is common on poorly policed markets like Amazon and Aliexpress.

And most of the products I've seen "grouped" in this way haven't had identifiable branding, they were just generic functional products like "heat shrink", or "M4x20 screws".

"It's great! Haven't tried it yet, but it looks nice"

(average aliexpress review on many tech items)

“Item received, will update later when I try it” = it killed them

I’ve been playing with cssbuy (there is pandabuy too) lately. Aliexpress range at temu prices basically.

I kinda dropped using Amazon, both on principle, but also because they can't compete anymore.

Amazon isn't exactly cheaper anymore, certainly not when you factor in shipping, their shipping times are awful, typically a week or more and you can't trust the reviews. They do have the larger selection of stuff, so if you can bundle a whole bunch of things it might still make sense. The problem is that you can't really find anything anymore and a large percentage of the stuff that you can only get on Amazon does not ship to your country.

Yeah my partner and I quit using them because we’d buy like 5-10 things and return them all because of issues like not matching the product listing or being garbage quality. The last straw was when they clawed back a return refund 4 times on the same return. Each time she would have to call them to get it reinstated.

If something is not remotely up to standard, do a return. I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful for them and probably only stick there is.

It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.

The stuff on aliexpress is not low quality. I mean, some for sure is if you look for the cheapest items, but there is plenty of solid quality stuff there as well.

Amazon is great for returns.

Buy $50 something from aliexpress, doesn't work, you can't do anything. Seller wont refund directly, you need to send the item back... to china... and fill out export forms and pay more than $50 for registered mail.

Amazon? Doesn't work? Doesn't matter why, here's the return label, we'll refund you the moment we get the return.

I just returned something on AliExpress last week.(Wrong items sent.) Sagawa showed up at my door to collect the package, I paid nothing, and AliExpress refunded me before it even left the country once Sagawa notified them that the package was collected.

So it really depends where you live.

I've never had to return to AliExpress - if I've had an issue they (AliExpress) have just instantly refunded me without having to go through the seller(admittedly this is maybe 2 items in nearly 10 years).

Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.

I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.

The thing is, you paid for that in the price which is often 3x more for the same thing you could get on Aliexpress. I bought plenty of stuff on Aliexpress and I had issue only once when I got something different than I ordered. Overall even if I lost on that one purchase a bit, I saved plenty of money on other purchases. And they have a lot of stuff that's simply unavailable elsewhere. Even if they sold me some counterfeit transistors, those must be really good counterfeits, because they measure fine.

Most of the Chinese crap sold on Amazon is identical to what you find on AliExpress and Temu marked up 50-200%.

Yeah but honestly unless it's a repeat purchase, I'll pay it for the customer service (and ordering experience frankly) being similarly up 5,000-20,000%.