The first thing to know is that I stopped asking for free shipping after my first bad experience. Since then, I have ordered several items, some of them being significantly more expensive than the one that caused my initial problem. I found out that using a real tracking post service such as PostNL was really good and safe.
Overall, after 2 years and may be 10 orders, I would say Tinydeal is a pretty good chinese provider with reasonable prices... let's have another view in another 2 years:-)