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I must be misunderstanding Alibaba. I thought it was related to buying wholesale goods to resell?



Alibaba.com is geared towards wholesale, aliexpress.com is geared more for single item(s) purchases. I've been buying stuff from Aliexpress for years.

Both Aliexpress.com and Alibaba.com belong to the same company; i.e. my login works on both websites.

Kinda like Myhabit.com's login is the same as your Amazon.com's login.


I'm curious, what payment method do you use? I was looking at buying something on Aliexpress but the lack of Paypal or Google Payments turned me off.


I use my debitcard. I trust them. Based on their wiki[1], they look like a huge company(e.g. Amazon) that doesn't necessarily have incentive to be randomly ripping people off via CC fraud.

That said, word of caution though

- Unless you want to pay insane shipping, your order won't arrive in the USA for like 4 to 6 weeks.

- Clothing sizes are tricky. I usually go one size bigger than my US/UK size. For my wife who wears S or XS, I have to get her medium - sometimes even that's too small.

- Clothing quality varies especially for lady's clothing. Nearly always it looks fantastic, but if you dare put it in the washing machine it will disintegrate. Wash by hand or dryclean.

- Order electronics at your own peril. That's just rolling dice. I've seen Android phones & tablets from them. When I have a few extra hundred lying around, I'm gonna try getting a laptop - and I fully expect to get junk. But I've also seen orders fulfilled surprisingly well.

- Customer Support doesn't usually have english as first language.

- So far, out of like 20+ orders. They've gotten maybe 2 completely wrong... or I misread the product-details(some of those pages can be tricky)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group


Alibaba owns their own PayPal competitor (Alipay). I don't think you need to worry.


Debit cards work just fine.


Alibaba.com is for wholesale, but Alibaba the company is much broader than that. They have two big consumer sites: Taobao.com and Tmall.com


They've also got a consumer site oriented towards foreigners - aliexpress.com


Whats the likely hood of receiving fake products if ordering from this site? I've had it happen myself with Amazon 3rd party sellers, however this site being in china makes me even more wary.


I've ordered many things (small accessories, cellphone & tablet screens, a cheap Android tablet, etc) from both Aliexpress and Chinese stores on eBay and always got what was announced. The cellphone screen was damaged, and they sent me another one without having to ship the first back or show any proof of the damage.

Besides the long shipping times (1-2 months to my door), it's been more reliable than shopping locally.


Hah, this prompted me to look online for an Android-based iPod knock-off and was quickly greeted with this awsome deal:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/in-stock-2014-New-model-Lenov...

Then some googling revealed that there is no such device as a "Lenovo S7000 5.0 inch Tablet".

Still aways to go, I think.


Ahah, yeah, that happens. A good way to avoid it is to buy from sellers with plenty of feedback. That shop only has 20 reviews, and only one for that particular product, so I definitely would stay away.


1-2 months! That is reason enough for me to leave it alone.

Is that common for all sellers or was it the item you ordered.


Well, most items I've ordered get here in a month or slightly under, with a couple having arrived in 1.5-2 months.

That said, I live in a country in the European periphery, so you might get better luck if you live in the US.


I've given up ; I never received anything I ordered from China.


I ordered 11 products this year (albeit small ones) and got every single one of them.


Not to mention their new etsy-a-like, 11main.


It's fascinating there's a company so large and it's completely unknown to the American market.




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