Online Shopping Reviews

According to Urban.com, the famous Chinese e-commerce online community, Aliexpress.com has been openly recruiting sellers of top international brands since early January, 2014. This activity will last till March 31. During this period, as long as you can provide valid data and pass through the qualification verification of Aliexpress.com, you will be allowed to sell branded products at the website. So far, only corporation-type sellers have been given the chance to apply for the qualification and individual sellers are excluded. Note that this time only 300 designated brands are invited to join the wholesale trading platform.

This is a sign indicating that Aliexpress.com is getting more and more ambitious in the international trading arena. In the Chinese foreign trade industry, people regard it as Aliexpress’ attempt to become an international Tmall.com, the biggest brand shopping website on the Chinese domestic market, also belonging to Alibaba Group. Lots of well-known brands with good international reputation have been invited to sell products to global buyers at Aliexpress.com, e.g. Camel, Big Foot, Pomp, Jewel Ora, Neo, etc. Even the famous online international fashion retail brand Milanoo.com has opened a franchise store there.

At Aliexpress.com, you can find an exclusive channel for the brands – you can access it by clicking on the Brand Showcase button at the bottom area of their homepage. There you can find products from verified brands covering various categories: Phones & Accessories, Computers & Accessories, Automotive, Jewelry & Watches, Wardrobe, Home & Garden and Kids & Toys. Compared to the majority of product listings at the site, products for sale in this channel are much better guaranteed in terms of authenticity, quality and related pre-sales and after-sales service.

Every brand included in that channel has to be strictly verified by Aliexpress.com in terms of qualifications before it opens the branded store there. All brands have signed an agreement with the website to guarantee that every product they are offering there is 100% genuine. If Aliexpress.com receives a complaint against any brand claiming that a product is counterfeit and proves it is true with valid evidence, the store will be significantly punished based on the agreement and even be removed from the website forever.

It is hard to compare Aliexpress.com to Lightinthebox.com, Milanoo.com or Dinodirect.com as they are adopting a totally different business model. While the sites are running their business with their own warehouses and selling things with their own internal staff, Aliexpress serves just as a third-party for both sellers and buyers. What they provide are a transaction platform and a payment protection service. Belonging to China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba Group, the Chinese site is so famous that countless Chinese suppliers are convinced to use the site for their foreign trade business. Thanks to the special business model which is actually invented originally by DHgate.com (read review), Aliexpress.com is probably carrying the widest array of women’s dresses that buyers from all over the world can buy directly from Chinese sellers. In particular, the summer dresses styled in floral printing have over 150,000 results when you search the site by the term “floral dresses”. Prices, images, seller profile and shipping information are also neatly listed so that you can take a closer look at those of your interest. No matter what kind of floral dresses you are looking for, e.g. mini floral dresses, floral Qipao dresses, floral maxi dresses, floral cocktail dresses, floral prom dresses, you won’t be disappointed there. For instance, the following collection of silk summer floral dresses comes from a premium seller with a 98.55 positive feedback at Aliexpress.com. They are available at $14.25 after a 5% discount. Note that a 3-piece MOQ is required for the offer.

See more summer floral printing dresses at Aliexpress.com >>

By using the site you have much more options in terms of styles and prices but you also need to pay more attention to the risks you are taking. You might encounter a dishonest seller who tries to take away your money by sending you a crappy product not at all worth the dollars you pay for it. Read more »

In terms of company size or popularity, Aliexpress.com and Lightinthebox.com are about the same. However, adopting different business models, the two sites have many differences that can separate them from each other. Here is how they stack up.

As compared to Lightinthebox, Aliexpress’s pros are:

• Wider product selection. Aliexpress (read the detailed review) is a wholesale trading platform and bridges buyers and suppliers. The site has a very broad product directory covering almost every field of a daily life from apparel, electronics, sporting goods, toys, jewelry & watches, automobiles & motorcycles, security & surveillance, health & beauty to anything else.

• More pricing choices. While the huge online wholesale shopping mall has countless products, buyers have much more pricing choices there as the same products are offered by different suppliers at different prices. As long as you do enough research when shopping at the site, you are likely to find out the best prices for the products of your interest. Generally, newly registered sellers tend to offer rock bottom prices in order to attract buyers and build their customer base.

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Aliexpress.com is just like another eBay, while it differs from the latter mainly in business types. Aliexpress focus on wholesale business and their customers are Chinese suppliers and resellers who shop there for their business. At the same time, some end consumers also choose to purchase things for their personal use as the required MOQ is as low as one piece only for a single order. Anyway, small and medium-sized businesses are the very back bone of Aliexpress.com and retail business is just an add-on there. You know, eBay.com is a retail trading platform and buyers are mostly consumers. Actually, many resellers at eBay.com source products from Aliexpress.com for their inventories. Here is how Aliexpress stacks up against eBay:

As compared to eBay.com, Aliexpress.com has the following advantages:

Much lower wholesale prices. The sellers doing business at Aliexpress.com are mainly manufacturers or wholesalers. Shopping directly with them means you can cut the middle-men as much as possible to enjoy the best prices. Many wholesale distributors there accept retail orders or orders in small wholesale quantities so that you can shop more flexibly. Even as a reseller you don’t have to put a big investment into your business for the stocking up part. You can try different products in small quantities to see which sell well and then source more for the better selling ones. However, most of the sellers at ebay.com serve end consumers and do retail business instead of wholesale business. Their products are sourced from wholesalers and they have to put a higher price tag in order to ensure the profit margin.

Wider selection of products. Aliexpress.com is much more impressive than eBay.com in terms of product range and total quantity of each category. As one of the biggest online wholesale shopping marketplaces, Aliexpress.com carries products for almost all fields related to our life. Each category or sub-category has thousands of even tens of thousands products or styles to choose from. What buyers only need is patience. As long as you spend enough time searching their catalogs, you will exactly what you want there.

Aliexpress product directory

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Days ago, one of my readers e-mailed me and left a comment about her strange experience with Aliexpress.com, from which she believes that the site is a fraud. As she claimed, her order was cancelled the next day and she received a message from the Aliexpress Order Verification Team, requiring her to provide the following information:

1. A copy of the business license or ID card
2. A photocopy of the front-side of the card
3. A copy of the card bank statement

She has tried to contact the Aliexpress service people to question the reasons for requiring the private information. Unfortunately she fails to reach anyone from the site.

Here is my reply to her comment regarding the issue left at my blog:

Hi XXX (name omitted to protect our reader’s private information),

As a third-party review site, we like you don’t exactly know why Aliexpress.com had asked you for the private information you mentioned about. From our own personal experience, we guess your order might have been detected as “abnormal” and they might be doing so to confirm on the ownership of the card and in order to avoid credit card fraud.

My husband has encountered similar situations with Paypal and a hosting service provider, both of which are based in the United States. His accounts were detected as “abnormal” and the companies asked him to provide the same information in order to unlock his accounts. Out of trust in the world renowned companies, he submitted the required information and got his accounts unlocked finally.

I understand that when you do not trust an international shopping site, it is very necessary to use extreme caution. Besides, I agree with you that the site should provide a way for users who have doubts for the requirement to ask questions and to confirm on the safety. Unfortunately Aliexpress.com gives users a really bad experience in this respect. If any Aliexpress people can see this comment, tell the customer service department to improve the service!

However, as a Chinese who has the ambition to introduce to the world the best China-based online shopping websites, I don’t agree that the site is a fraud. My reasons:

• Aliexpress is the most famous international transaction website for small and medium-sized businesses in China, especially among the Chinese suppliers;

• The site does belong to Alibaba.com, the world top e-commerce website;

• I personally have some honest and hard-working friends and old colleagues currently working for the site. I don’t believe people with such integrity would join a fraud site, which may destroy their career prospect.

I know Aliexpress has many negative or bad reviews, which can be found everywhere on the internet. As a person having worked for a site similar to Aliexpress.com, it is nothing strange to me. If you want to shop with a Chinese site with less negative reviews, you are encouraged to choose the online suppliers like Lightinthebox.com or Dinodirect.com instead of an online transaction platform like Aliexpress.com. The former type of shopping sites is responsible for everything related to a transaction, from pre-sales service to after-sales service. And they themselves verify the quality of the products as they have their own warehouses. Once a dispute occurs, they are able to solve your problem in a much more efficient way. Different from such sites, Aliexpress.com has to side with either seller or buyer when a dispute happens. As a result the other side is always unhappy, you know.

Thank you for trusting us by emailing us and leaving comments here about your story with Aliexpress.com. It is my shame that I can’t answer your questions. Anyway, now I am very concerned about the case and will do some research on this topic to uncover the facts in case more readers are bothered by the same situation.

Best regards,

Jessie
Danviews.com

If you are a regular shopper of AliExpress.com, you may have noticed that almost every category has a list of top sellers listed on the left navigation. These AliExpress top sellers are verified by AliExpress.com and rated basically in terms of positive feedback percentage, seller tier, sale volume, customer service and more. As such suppliers have a proven record of good reputation, trading with them is generally more hassle-free.

Based on my findings, the AliExpress Top Sellers have a positive customer feedback percentage as high as 100% — so far 93% seems to be the lowest standard among such suppliers. In addition, the top sellers usually have a much higher orders completed rate as well as a much bigger feedback quantity over the past 6 months.

You can check out the details of the top-rated suppliers by visiting their stores. In the store homepage of each store, you can find the product listing, top-selling products, feedback score, TrustPass Profile, About Us and Contact Details of the seller at the top navigation. Below is the list of featured products the seller offers, most of which are on-sale products or best-selling products.

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