Andrew Mawson wrote:
Anyone had experience buying through Aliexpress ?

http://www.aliexpress.com/

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

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)