Alibaba experiences

Most of them are aliexpress sellers so some of their stuff can be bought in their aliexpress stores.

If you like something just contact them, negotiate and arrange right price.
Paypal would be nice as there is no way they can screw you up because paypal protects you. And 80% of them accepts paypal.
Insist that they send paypal invoice to you once when goods is arranged.

And at the end ODM and OEM are wonderful thing… If you have your own design and ideas they will create it for you. Like your own flashlight, your own OEM (your logo and laser engravings) would be usually at 50+ flashlight your ODM (your design+logo) usually starts at 300+ pcs of flashlights.

nothing wrong with Alibaba…the ceo was on the news yesterday with a big grin on his face…stock values are way up