Well…
This is not such an easy decision now that PayPal is being dropped by many sellers, even some of my favorites. We can scream all we want about demanding PayPal, but they deserve the treatment they are getting; their policies are downright vile at this point and I guarantee that malcontents will use those policies to cause financial harm to payment recipients, just for the fun of it.
Yes, I do avoid handing my credit card number to every store in existence, but AliExpress/Alibaba are a super-large company that does have the incentive, and hopefully budget, to actively protect their systems.
I had never given them my card info before, but I grew rather desperate to complete my last purchase (the seller was waiting on payment) and did eventually use my real credit card number with AliExpress . No, I didn’t tell AE to save the number, but I don’t expect that this option provides any relevant security as stores must keep your card number on file for some length of time to honor refunds, etc.
I uncheck every “Save” box I come across and this disables the saving feature on my end, for sure, but there’s no guarantee whatsoever that the store actually erases our credit info from their records.
Some people have found alternatives, such as a PayPal debit card, and some credit card companies offer temporary or one-time-use “virtual” numbers. With PayPal being a *ick these days, our options are more limited. It would be nice if another payment option became more common globally.