sergio z.

I purchased a $700 item and paid instantly. Seller Name: GoodLuckBuy.

Two weeks later the seller send me a message (they go straight to your spam folder… smart aliexpress) saying he didn't have the item in stock, and will ship when he can.

I checked with other suppliers, and many renamed the publication as "back order", although the delivery times and shipping remained the same in the system.

It seems the manufacturer would punish them if they offered a discount, and because of the currently running 11.11 discount, most decided to just delaay the delivery, rather than stopping the publications (causing losses to buyers)

My seller didn't update the publication. He just kept allowing orders as normal and purposely delaying them.

I wanted to cancel the order, considering the item was not in stock, but the seller MARKED THE ITEM AS SHIPPED.

Yes, ALIEXPRESS.COM ALLOWS SELLERS to MARK ITEMS AS SHIPPED without validating the tracking number, so sellers can enter a BOGUS tracking number to lock the sale up the maximum delivery time allowed in the term and conditions (60 days), despite you paid for 5-10day shipping.

Unable to cancel it, I opened a dispute, and the chat operators adviced me to wait.
In three different chats none of them adviced me to reject the item, until a last operator told me "in his whole year in the company, his experienced was 'it is better to receive the item" or I could be guilty of breaking the contract!

By the third operator I already knew the answers given were not useful or even misdirecting, so they would just go "I'm glad I was able to help. Do you have any question? No? Well, thank you for contacting us…" all in the same second, to get disconnected, or kept looping between the same two answers over and over to wear you down! Like a robot (which I know they are not, because some expressed their frustration because I was not happy with the hollow answers.

This operator was trying to convince me to accept te mail (my question was what to do in the worst scenarios, like the seller shipping anyway DHL and still arriving before the 60 days, despite my written request to cancel the order).

In short, I was told many times to "wait", "not to worry", sometimes I was told the protected money didn't include shipping, others told me the protection only protects the item value, not the shipping… I was even told "the escalated dispute could be decided against my favor "because I didn't cancel it before shipping", despite the whole dispute would be managed by human beings who could easily spot the seller's fraud.

I quickly escalated the dispute and that only ADDED EXTRA TIME FOR THE SELLER TO SHIP IT.

Fortunately for me, I told the seller that I would reject the shipping, so that discourages them from shipping a brick, just to generate a tracking number (yes, they could)

The escalation "experts" (I bet another 90% system overviewed by two people superficially reading the notes, and clicking the pre-defined buttons to favor the seller in different ways) gave the seller 3 days to provide a valid tracking number. Not THE tracking number, but A tracking number, completely omitting the fact the seller ALREADY COMMITTED FRAUD and giving him another chance to FORCE ME to accept the item, as if he had never cheated the system to prevent me to fairly cancel the transaction.

Today, 3 days after the expiration of the request, the dispute is STILL OPEN (it was not automatically setup to close when the seller fails to provide the proofs, which proofs there's no real intentions to punish dishonest sellers.

Read the tips below I gathered for you, at least from two incidents. (All the chat saved conversations and screenshots are disponibles to anyone contacting me)

Another seller, ThanksBuyer, was honest enough to let me know they were not shipping the item because the manufacturer prohibits them to sell that a dime cheaper, so everyone selling the same item were not shipping until after 11.11. They offered me to buy it from their own website (against AliExpress rules) and although their website looked legit, I didn't take the risk right now that my planets are favoring online scams.

GoodLuckBuy decided to lock the sale marking it as "shipped" instead, and AliExpress protects both, filling the "Buyer Protection" marketing with big words, when they are actually POWERLESS.