frank r.

As much as so many are criticising the site, I would like to point out the following: Ebay has some ridiculous and scandaleous rules and I almost lost $31 there because of their stupid decision and a crook seller who only refunded me after I threatened him about complaining to the ministry of commerce of his country. I bought more than 200 items on aliexpress and only 2 never came. On ebay, I got scammed 9 times on about 50 items. The thing is, you must be VERY careful when checking the comments, description, ratings, etc... I would at times buy an item with a rating of 3.0 instead of buying the same from another seller with a rating of 5.0. The reason is I check the negative comments AND the positive ones. I try to see if comments that took down the rating are justified. Sometimes, they are not. Also, never buy from a seller with 0% rating. This is the sign of a scammer. About shipping, its mostly office of exchange and custom office that cause the big delay. Its sound to say that Aliexpress can't be responsible for the laziness of the guys from the above offices. I've been running an online shop using Aliexpress and I have no complaints to date because I CHOOSE carefully from WHICH seller I buy and WHAT I buy. A few tips for you:
1. Check comments on an item for different sellers. If there is a drawback with it, several sellers will have similar negative comments about it.
2. Check the item rating AND the number of purchases AND the number of comments about it. Now decide which seems better: An item rated 5.0, ordered 30 times with 3 comments (when commenting, the customer has to rate the item. So, number of comments sort of define rating.) or an item rated 4.6, ordered 5000+ times with 3000+ comments? If you can deduce what you should choose, you can minimise the risk of a nasty surprise.
3. Order is taking ages to come? Check the delivery details. If its left China, a call to your local post office should make it come to you quickly (from personal experience). Also, November and December are peak periods. Whether I ordered from ebay, bookdepository, amazon or aliexpress, everything took a lot more time than usual to reach me. Wanna buy something for christmas? Order it in September or the first week of October. After that? Well... you may have it in time for valentine's day...