On 22/02/17 09:33, root wrote:
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.

Ouch. I haven't had a problem with a $100 order, only small ones.

For example, one vendor shipped a dangerous illegal "power saving"
device (small capacitor and an LED) with a European socket, when
I had ordered a 12V 3A power brick. Duh. It wasn't hard to convince
Ali that it belonged in the bin, and I got my money back.
A battery pack for a hand-held transceiver never arrived, though
tracking said it was in a warehouse somewhere... after six weeks
I got my money back. Another order for five magnets shipped one,
so I got an 80% refund. Three problems in perhaps 60 orders...

So yeah, you can have problems... but none so far has cost me anything.

My experience with Amazon is the exact opposite.

Yep, Amazon is good. They just don't have many of the things I want.

Clifford Heath.