AliExpress price weirdness

That usually happens when they set the listing up as having different “models”, but the cheap “model” is just an accessory (like a power cord).

Can you confirm if you follow my links you see the prices I see?

AliExpress:
Original Opus BT- C3100 V2.2 Smart Digital Intelligent 4 LCD Slots Universal Battery Charger for Rechargeable Battery | EU Plug US $43.60
Original Opus BT- C3100 V2.2 Smart Digital Intelligent 4 LCD Slots Universal Battery Charger for Rechargeable Battery | US Plug US $43.60
Original Opus BT- C3100 V2.2 Smart Digital Intelligent 4 LCD Slots Universal Battery Charger for Rechargeable Battery | UK Plug non-available to select for me

Price Archive price is also US $ 23.56 but no history and selecting the blue button “open on AliExpress” shows again the page US $43.60

Update: Search for “Opus BT- C3100 V2.2” in AE’s searchbar brings up quite a few results, some just under US $30

Yes, I confirm that I see what you see.
No, I don’t mean the scam of showing the cheapest “variant” but rather the case when the search listing is cheaper than the cheapest variant. Often the only variant.

Thanks for confirming.

The same happens to me…

The cheapest that I found: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32834470137.html

Hmm, it seems they slashed the price just minutes ago. Thanks MtnDon.

probably pricearchive does not update the price in real-time, so you still see the old price

I had been manually tracking my items in the cart, so I knew the price history for the last few days already when I discovered priceArchive.org.

Perhaps the price fluctuates a lot during the hours we sleep in the US, and it’s during those hours priceArchive takes their one sample per day.

I feel your pain. I’ve gotten so disillusioned with AX/GB/BG/whatever (FT is still in my good graces, though), that I’ve pretty much just be contributing to the “buy Bezos his new hot-tub” fund.

Hello Joshk and all the members of this topic.

My name is Vitali and I’m developing Pricearchive. Sometimes I browse the mentions of the service on Google and that’s how I saw the topic. Allow me to add a few comments to clarify the situation.

Joshk,
Every day our service tracks about 12 million goods. That’s a huge number. But the fact is, on the Aliexpress, more than 40 million goods are on sale every day. Unfortunately, Aliexpress has limits on the amount of information we can get in one day. So it’s impossible to track all the goods. You are interested in just such a product about which we did not collect information earlier. See the price chart. It indicates that price information was received last time on February 7 and the exact time is indicated.
I do my best to have as few products as possible with a small amount of data. An update will be launched tomorrow, which will significantly reduce the number of such products.
There is one more good news. If you checked the product through the Search on the Pricearchive website (for this you need to insert its address in the form * https: //.aliexpress.com/) or looked at the history of price changes in our browser extension, then Pricearchive will collect data on it every day. True, with the exception of today, because today technical work is being carried out that prevents this.

Perhaps this happens, but this is most likely not the case.

This certainly happens, but this is not your case.

Please check the exact time on the price chart Pricearchive received the price information. I would probably agree that the time of receipt of price information should be specified additionally next to the product picture. I added this to the implementation list. Sorry if this is misleading.

No, Aliexpress prices usually change no more than once a day. I can say this with confidence. Yeah, it may happen that Pricearchive will receive a price at the beginning of the day and after 10 hours it will change. In this case, you always see the exact time of receipt of the price on the price chart, and thus you have everything to make a purchasing decision.

Joshk, If you have time to wait until the price drops to what you want, you can use our price drop email alerts.

And I will add one more good news. In about a month, Pricearchive will show the same goods from different sellers, if they exist. Thus, you can find cheaper products without waiting until the price of the product you find is reduced.

I will be happy to answer your questions if you still have them.

I removed the PriceArchive extension and won’t even look at the site anymore. I’ve found I am tempted to look, but it’s just a waste of time.
Out of about 10 items I tried to look up, only one actually worked. The rest either had no price history, it was wrongly tracking the price history of an accessory (not the main item) or the price was just plain wrong. User PriceArchive explained in PM that when the price is just plain wrong, it’s because AliExpress is giving different prices depending on the country you are viewing from. And PriceArchive apparently is not viewing from the USA.

Interesting to know. So a VPN could improve the item price….
….I really hate how complicated is this game.

The different price per country might also explain that thread here on BLF where some items required your login before you could view the page and others didn’t.

Hi Joshk, I'm sorry you didn't like Pricearchive. But there are inaccuracies in your words and incomplete information on my part that I would like to correct so that the community knows how things really are.

Honestly, it's really weird. The fact is that every day people check more than 1,000 goods on our website and in the browser extension. I'm sorry, I can't say a more accurate number, hope you understand. And I see that we don't have information for only about 10 of them. For example, in the last 19 hours a lot of items have been checked and only for these 6 items we didn't have data. These are the ids of the items you can now enter in the search on the site.

33037961705

4000667088526

4000631314882

4000730788322

4000029982273

4000710339444

Could you show me the goods you checked? That would be very helpful. I would also like to add that if you have checked the price through the website or if you have looked at the price chart of an item in the browser extension, we start monitoring the price for that item every day. If the purchase is not in a hurry and we do not track the price every day after other people's request, it is not a bad way to check the price history after a while. For example, if you know you are going camping in the summer, check the price today for a tent you like. At the time of purchase you will definitely have enough price data to make a purchase decision.

We do not track prices for accessories. We track only the lowest price for the item.

It's only true for a small number of goods. The fact is, only a small fraction of sellers change prices for buyers from different countries. That's what I wrote you about in PM. It doesn't mean we don't track prices for the USA. In most cases, the prices are the same for different countries. I didn't specify one thing for you. If the seller does set different prices for different countries, changes the price of the item, then the price almost always goes up or down for all countries.

Therefore, even if these sellers do not have the same price for your country, the dynamics of price change is still useful. You can see on which days the price is high or low.

And I have some very good news. After about ten days, a "Search by image" will become available. Pricearchive will begin to show how much the exact same item costs from other sellers right now and for the country that you specify. Of course, if such items exist.

Here's an example from our internal tests. If you want to find the same T-shirts from other sellers, the result will be about the same. The item ID is shown next to the picture.You can open these items on AliExpress right now. Just change the item ID on the link https://www.aliexpress.com/item/111111111111.html. For this example, the search was carried out only for 3% of the images that we have.

4000631631539 4000631631539 4000082998639 4000082998639 4000631631539 4000082998639 4000082998639 4000082998639 4000631631539 4000082998639 4000631631539 4000345004700 4000345004700 4000265278918 4000477149561 4000516820144 4000476958770 4000594958353 4000054022524 4000279232025 4000516820144 4000265278918 4000054022524 4000054022524 4000265278918 4000516820144 4000594958353 4000265689258 4000279232025 4000477149561 4000345004700 4000476958770 4000265278918 4000476958770 4000443177774 4000477149561 4000477149561 4000548215910 4000345004700 4000594958353 4000265833105 4000516820144 4000443177774 4000443177774 4000265689258 4000443177774 4000265833105 4000265833105 4000548215910 4000442239890 4000548293027 4000548215910 4000105306171 4000054022524 4000265833105 4000476958770 4000548215910 4000535186842 4000535344507 4000594958353 4000442239890 4000443177774 4000113459429 4000105306171 4000476958770 4000477149561 4000279232025 4000113459429 33053198911 4000420901805 4000320153198 4000548293027 4000054022524 4000442239890 4000265833105 4000055257460 4000313939182 4000442239890 4000477149561 4000320153198 4000239679529 4000265689258 4000345004700 4000594958353 4000345004700 4000548293027 4000279232025 4000586255389

I’m not on your R&D team, so this post is going to be minimal effort and time.

Untrue. When an item like a pen kit has three choices: Gold/Chrome/SpareBushing, you just track the price of the Spare Bushing because it is far cheaper than the Gold-colored Pen Kit, or the Chrome-colored Pen Kit. I previously described this issue, so I think you understand and just downplay it. It’s everywhere. A thermostat I tried to lookup had a choice for a spare sensor wire, so PriceArchive only tracked the price of the Spare Wire, nothing for the thermostat.

It’s been a week or more since I bothered to check price archive seriously, that’s why when it failed me again yesterday I removed it immediately.

You seem to think it’s working good enough, but I think your small user base proves people just aren’t having a positive experience.

Well. Perhaps I could help you in your situation and explain.

I’ll explain in more detail. When we receive the price of an item, AliExpress does not inform us that the item may have accessories. So I wrote that we do not track the price of the accessory on purpose just because it’s the cheapest. But sometimes what you wrote about does happen if the item has an accessory and it is cheaper than the item.

Yeah, it happens for some items. But I don’t think that’s a reason to write such a negative review with information that’s only true for a small part of the goods. I’m not downplay anything, I have statistics for millions of goods and constantly spend a lot of time researching.

Believe me, the number of users is not small. I can even tell you that there are people who use Pricearchive every day and have several accounts each of which tracks about 1,000 items.

As for people’s feedback, here are a couple of examples from recent times. Other people don’t confirm what you’re saying. I guess there’s nothing wrong with publishing them here.

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 18:58:51

你的pricearchive 插件太好用了,是我全网遇到的最好用的一个。这个插件有个意外的功能超出你想象。给你写一封邮件仅仅表达对你的感谢以及对此产品的喜欢。
期待新功能“搜索同类产品”早日上线(其他人这个功能做的实在太差了)
Thanks

Jan 30, 2020

Very helpful tool. Here is what I like.

  1. Such a great idea makes it so easy to buy at the lowest prices.
  2. The extension needs permissions only for Aliexpress and Pricearchive websites.
  3. Very detailed price charts with data for the last few years. I haven’t seen this anywhere else.
  4. Price charts can be seen in different currencies. I found the one I need.
  5. Convenient package tracking. It is really convenient and saves time.
  6. Everything is free and it’s great!

I repeat. I’m sorry that you see more minuses than pluses. It’s a pity that you don’t want to show the items you are talking about. You can send them to PM if you do not want to publish them here. If you agreed to show them, perhaps I could help you and improve the service exactly according to your feedback.

And again, perhaps you will like our “Search by image” for the same and similar items from other sellers.

Dude, there’s nothing I search for that I would be ashamed to make public. If I had a screen-recorder running on my PC last week when I gave priceArchive it’s last chance I would gladly upload that.
Here’s my most-recent orders on AliExpress:

Leaded Solder + Flux
Buck converter board
Voltage display board
AAA battery shrink wrap
LED strip
Metric power connectors
3amp fuses in bulk
TP4056 charger board

Like many on BLF, I am a DIY type person. I mostly buy parts for my projects on AliExpress. This type stuff shares product pages with odd variants.

That’s not what I meant. I was talking about data privacy no matter what the item.

Thank you so much for that information. I will try to figure out and find these items on AliExpress and see if there are any cases you mentioned and if there is anything I can do to improve the service.