Clifford Heath wrote:

You're wrong to discount Aliexpress. You get access to thousands of
vendors (same as EBay) but none of them see your credit card, and
until you approve of the product *as delivered*, they don't get your
money either. If you receive nothing, or they ship the wrong thing,
or even if it's demonstrably faulty, Ali mediates a resolution.
The most common resolution is that you bin the item and get your
money back.

For China Post shipping of small items (3 cigarette packet size)
you get free shipping... my orders are often under $20... no Western
supplier will do this for you.

The one and only time I bought an ebay item from outside the US, I
bought something from the UK. The order got all screwed up, and it
turned into a huge hassle. I lost money, got an item I did not really
want, and the seller lost too.

This does not happen with Aliexpress.



I could not disagree more with your assertions about AliExpress. If you
receive goods which were either defective or not as represented you
can get your money back but only if you ship the items back to
the sender at your expense. On a recent $105 order with AliExpress,
the shipping cost to return the item was $48. It took weeks of
email exchanges with the sender before they were even willing
to take back the item. My experience with Amazon is the exact
opposite.