Aliexpress is one of the biggest e-commerce websites, where you can buy almost anything you can think of. It contains many sellers, selling all kind of products, from factories in China. Many ask, is Aliexpress a trustworthy place, where I will get what I pay for?
The simple answer, not always. Especially if you are a customer, looking to buy a quality product. Merchant on the other hand, has the upper hand in this market, with power to buy and many sellers to choose from. Put it simply, sellers on Aliexpress want to sell their products, whether they are dodgy sellers or not!
Being a buyer and seller myself, I have had many experiences, where sellers sold defective or low quality products and not own responsibility and simply kept the money, with no refund or even a replacement. This is common in a large market place such as Ali, where there is not many policing, except for honesty.
After a tedious and very long process of finding and eliminating potential business partners, my long list of reliable and trustworthy sellers just keep growing. It was not easy, nor was it cheap.
Most times, you can buy a good product on Aliexpress, but there are times when the opposite is true and there are times where you simply don’t receive your item and you wont get your money back either, as I will explain about one of our customers, that got a really bad deal with a seller from Ali. If PierreGo was not created, this customer would have lost his money and no product to show for!
1. Here are some of the complaints, we have received from customers.
- Faulty or defective product returned and money not refunded.
- Sellers make it very difficult to get a refund or exchange
- The product is not as described
- Product not received (seller has disappeared)
The list goes on…
One of the most tell tale signs of a dishonest seller is when they send you through loops to get what’s rightfully yours. They do this so that you can’t leave them a not so good review and hence, potential customers don’t have a clue. From the moment you purchase a product, you have 15 days to lodge a dispute. After 30 days, reviews are disabled for that seller.
Defective product from Shenzhen BBY(Lucky42012) Technology Co..Ltd
Here is a story about one of our customers, who had a bad experience from a seller and if it weren’t for us, he’d lost his money.
This client we will call Al. Al had bought a smart watch, from one of our sellers, who we presumed was honest. He was a seller in our long list of sellers, that turned out to be not so honest and quite frankly, not so intelligent either as he no longer gets advertisement nor traffic from us.
So coming back to Al. After Al was given a list on what to do to send back the defective product, in exchange of a non defect one, he followed the procedure carefully.
He was given exact instructions, to pay for the return shipping costs and send the receipt. Whilst he did everything the seller asked for, he then waited. Time had past and Al wondered, what was the hold up? He checked the return tracking and noticed that the product was already in China and had been sitting there for quite some time.
We asked the seller, if he had received the returned item. He said he did not receive it. So after sending this seller the tracking number and logistics that were used, he checked it. The seller then responded and said that the product was sitting in customs and can not be cleared, as there is no phone number on the item. This was not in the description (in the list), of what was instructed by the seller. The address in full that was given by the seller, was clearly written on the postage envelope.
In this case, the seller simply did not respond and no refund was given, nor was the item returned! This was a loss on us.
We tried on numerous attempts to contact Shenzhen BBY(Lucky42012) Technology Co..Ltd and they did not respond.
So when asked, is Aliexpress honest? The simple answer is yes; just the sellers within, you need to be careful of.
