AliExpress has this quality of being a surprise gift for your future self. You buy stuff, forget about it, and then one day receives a pleasant surprise. This only works with cheap stuff you don't mind a lot, if it's too expensive you risk just being anxious for a long time.
This is exactly why I buy everything I can off of AliExpress. The question of "will I still want this in 4-12 weeks?" really takes the impulse out of impulse buying.
It's surprising that they are. And sometimes it's a padded envelope inside a padded envelope, both having stickers with my address on them. I've also gotten packages where the stamp says "Kazahkstan Post". Geez, I wonder what the routing is (I believe they optimize for cost)..
I once ordered such a set from AliExpress. It had silicone insulation, making it the best set I ever used because it can be soldered to anything without the insulation melting away. Perfect for prototyping.
The seller was potentially buying the product off sparkfun with a stolen credit card. In return, they receive money from you through a legitimate business transaction.
They’ve just washed money from a stolen credit card.
My last purchase was an envelope in an envelope both with my address. One had the USPS printed stamp out of NYC. I assume my orEr was palletized. Then container shipped to NYC.
That and aliexpress has cracked a nut that eBay hasn’t even figured out: consolidating shipments from different sellers in one package to minimize last mile delivery costs.
Some of these “bag in a bag” deals might be consolidation “misses”
My child has learned that when a package says “JFK” on the return address to shout “more fun stuff from China!”
But yeah, that’s what they do for a lot of shipments. Repackage and mail them from New York. Occasionally get something from Memphis, which I assume means they packed it into FedEx to start.
And any small gadget/gizmo/thing you can think of, and had no chance of finding anywhere, is probably sold by multiple sellers over there. That's also unique (or was until it was banned).
I wonder if that's what makes it slightly addictive? One of the attraction of gambling is the thrill of surprise winning, amidst the many losses that upset you. So in some ways, the cheap products of AliExpress, that sometimes surprises you with its utility or quality, with the unpredictable shipping, is akin to the popular cheap coin based slot machines in casinos.
I've purchased a couple items from AliExpress, and it's definitely an experience. In my case, it starts with calling my credit card issuer and having them turn off all fraud protection on the card for an hour, because otherwise the charges get rejected so early, they don't even show up for customer service.
The items I purchased arrived as expected when expected, although with much more tape than expected (I guess they're optimizing for ocean shipping by making sure the packages will float by themselves!)
I'd been told they use excessive tape because the quality of the cardboard packaging available is so poor that it's somewhat necessary. I don't know why getting better cardboard boxes isn't the answer in that case but perhaps there's some reason for that, too.
I was just exploring some Tablet PC on AE, and one of the sellers had posted a photo of how the tablet would be shipped - it would be without the box, directly wrapped with small-bubbles plastic wrap, then wrapped / placed inside a big-bubble plastic box-like wrap and then placed inside an envelope (obviously with a lot of tape)! Looks like they prefer and trust plastic over cardboard.
I've found that rarely is that super cheap stuff worth it. I'd rather get something engineered well and built to last than disposable chinesium that'll end up in the landfill shortly after.
Some things are just plain cheap to make, like various small electronic gadgets/adaptors/components for example. You can buy the chinesium for cheap on aliexpress or you can buy the chinesium for more on Amazon.
Reminds me of the time I ordered a $5 nano drone from AliExpress, and after 2 months Indian customs sent me a very threatening ‘show cause’ notice demanding I pay $50 as a fine and appear before the customs officer or whoever to explain why I should not be prosecuted for the illegal importation of illegal goods (no drone with the letter of course). I opted to ignore the matter
I remembered growing up with a the children of a customs officer. Every now and then he would show up with boxes of confiscated pirated movie / game days discs, asking us to pick what we wanted before he was going to return the rest of lot to presumably be ‘destroyed’.
So I’m reasonably sure some some customs officer’s kid ended up enjoying the $5 drone I ordered. The circle of life I guess?
> I remembered growing up with a the children of a customs officer. Every now and then he would show up with boxes of confiscated pirated movie / game days discs, asking us to pick what we wanted before he was going to return the rest of lot to presumably be ‘destroyed’.
At this point I'm pretty convinced a lot of Indian institutions are just cargo culting things they saw in the west. [0]
Can you imagine how better and more productive Indian society would be if some of these bureaucracies were just abolished? Superpower by 2030?
You linking to a definition of cargo cult (which everyone already knows) does nothing to substantiate your notion that Indians are merely cargo culting the west by having customs officers.
2016-18 i think i ordered a bunch of crap from aliexpress just because it was possible and i got really good experience with refunds for no delivery and such. i bought tonnes of garbage but it was a nice experience.
then the banhammer dropped and i haven't touched it since. are we still able to buy from aliexpress today?
edit: just to see if i could, i have bought plastic hooks worth 6 INR from aliexpress. they got delivered. mind=blown
the thing that makes it confusing is that first you mention 2016-2018. Then you say you wonder if it is possible to order from AliExpress still. Then you add an edit saying just to see if you could you placed an order.
That's why it's easy to read your edit as saying that you placed an order today. Which then gets confusing when you say they got delivered :p
Reminds me of the time that my mom ordered shoes off of some random FB ad. Her credit card was charged and we waited a few weeks. Tried to go back to the site to see what the order status was and the site didn't exist anymore! We assumed that she just got scammed and did a chargeback to get a refund. A YEAR later the shoes randomly show up in the mail -- original website has long since vanished off the face of the internet.
Its extreme, but having seen a lot of pictures from Chinese package shipping warehouses its not that surprising. Guess it was stuck under a conveyor belt or something.
I used buy smaller items like keychains from AliExpeess. Then twice I bought pricey stuff costing more than $50 each expecting a better quality product. Boy was I wrong! All that changed was the packaging. It wasn’t dirty anymore. But the items were still extremely poor in quality. Reminded me of the book “Poorly made in China”
You can get high quality stuff out of China, but it is hard to do for one off purchases unless you know a bunch about it and have some hints and tricks (because if there is a good deal someone will start making a crap version with the same photos).
Just not at bargain basement prices anymore! Buy cheap shit from Shandong Trinket Manufacturing Ltd and yeah, but I've had okay luck if it's a reputable company.
Most of the electronic/mechanical things I've bought through AliExpress are poor quality, dying within a few months. But two solar panels (separate purchases/different vendors) have been absolute champs for the ~2 years keeping my security cameras charged.
I ordered something from deal extreme once, it was a headphone jack button you could map to a custom action in android. This was like 2012. Never showed up so I got a refund. Over a year later it somehow showed up.
Meanwhile every single one of my Aliexpress orders have showed up and exceeded expectations, shipping time be damned.
I once sent a postcard to my mom in Puerto Rico from the Gili Islands in Indonesia. The outdoor mailbox at an old post office was overflowing with mail — I just left my postcard on the pile of mail hoping for the best but not expecting much. Lo and behold my mom received the postcard 2 years later.
The longest delivery I ever endured makes for a funny anecdote now, too.
2020. Lockdowns. Everybody needs Internet. My neighbor was a nice lady who didn't have much tech knowledge. She was borrowing WiFi from a guy upstairs. Her computer was a hand-me-down from a former neighbor too. It was an HP all-in-one and the WiFi controller burned out. So she made it my mission to restore her connectivity.
I knew we'd need a dongle, and so I shopped for them on Amazon and Newegg while she looked on. For some dumb, stupid, unfathomable reason, I decided that the best choice was for about $12, direct from China. We plunked down our money and placed our order, and began to wait.
I communicated the situation to my online friends, and there's a guy who always sends me his secondhand, usable electronics. He had a dongle handy and so he mailed it to me.
It was like September 2020. The Chinese dongle from Amazon stalled out. I think it had shipped from the vendor and it was just sitting on a ship in port somewhere, for ages. It didn't budge for weeks, months.
The other dongle arrived from my friend in Utah and I installed it, and my neighbor was happy again. But we still hadn't received our treat from China.
And then one day it dislodged itself, the ship made it across the Pacific, and the thing finally landed in my mailbox. So I installed that dongle too, and my neighbor had dual-channel WiFi. Total overkill, totally unnecessary, but why not, eh? Thanks, COVID-19!
Oh, so is this is a seller that processed the transaction after four years? Or did customs have a big box of AliExpress stuff in storage for four years that they only released when the platform was unbanned.
Related, I had a medium size Ali package stuck in transit for eight months at one point. I’d like to know what even happened to make it take that long. Was it stuck on a loading dock? In customs? Lost in the corner of a warehouse?
> Oh, so is this is a seller that processed the transaction after four years? Or did customs have a big box of AliExpress stuff in storage for four years that they only released when the platform was unbanned.
I don't have definitive answers, but the package was posted in 2019 (2019.05.23.20 -> 23 May 2019 08:?? pm China local time), so this is not the answer. Neither that Indian customs can reasonably sort which packages are from AliExpress: they're sent in the manufacturer's name so that's out too.
More likely that it was stuck somewhere unrelated to the China-India tit-for-tat (more likely that it already passed Indian customs and was just somehow stuck somewhere in the Indian mail system until someone have noticed this undelivered package).
Are there good tips for Ali Express that elude normal people like me?
I once tried to order a few blank clothing items, real basic stuff, and it was an utterly bewildering array of options so I picked a DFW things and what showed up was just the poorest imaginable quality.
Look at the review with pictures as well as the order amount. Search for similar items and compare the quality. Clothing can be a real tossup because it's hard to judge quality from pictures alone.
I've never ordered clothes or the like from there, but Temu/Banggood/AliExpress are pretty good sources for a lot of relatively small woodworking stuff. You can get mostly the same stuff on Amazon, often even for Prime, but it's double to triple the cost and it's never that immediately necessary.
The product reviews are often pretty good on aliexpress. They don’t seem as “gamed” as Amazon, but often there are few(er) reviews and the auto-translations can be quite cryptic.
Aliexpress is particularly popular in places that don’t have a big eBay or Amazon presence.
I ordered so many hobby electronics parts From AliExpress before India banned it. I learnt so much for my career from these. I hate that I owe large parts of my career not to my country, because I'm self taught, but to my own resourcefulness. Once AliExpress was gone, so was my interest in hobby electronics and DIY Mechanical Keyboards. We don't get most of these things here in India, and our government wants to develop industries here without nurturing the DIY engineer who will one day provide jobs by making a company from his passion.
I wonder why @dang would consider an article such as this postworthy without any doubt, whereas he had to be convinced to allow an article about a literal armed rebellion against a nuclear power...
The value of a HN post lies not so much in the article itself, but in the surrounding discussion. While notable, a discussion about Prigozhin’s rebellion would have likely dissolved into low-value political squabbling.
On the other hand, an interesting, but unimportant happening such as the one in this post is fertile ground for quality comments.
And yet the comments on the thread I saw were quite useful — many from Russian speaking people confirming that the same news was being shown in Russia, etc.
(@dang doesn't work - I only saw this by accident)
For the same reason that e.g. a supreme court decision doesn't get read at a concert.
People sometimes argue that a story is so important it ought to be on HN, but that's a non sequitur. HN isn't about the most important things in the world. Many things are far more important than everything on the front page right now. HN is a site for intellectual curiosity, and that's always going to involve a certain amount of trivia - like living in spherical homes, or pumping your own gas in Oregon.
...because dang operates in mysterious and incomprehensible ways. It is a site for weirdos by weirdos after all; better don't try to find a bigger reason behind.
