Same problem; can’t browse without first logging in. And using a VPN couldn’t log in. Was fine some days ago (’bout a week).
Update: Just now, can browse their site no loggin (on VPN).
Probably changed some tracking parameters on some of their servers and had a cascade effect depending where you are.
This behavior first appeared months ago, sporadically, with certain stores. More recently, it has become much more prevalent, site wide.
Some speculate that it’s an effort to prevent spiders from scraping info off AX, which I guess is plausible, but the site is already so convoluted in the way it and the sellers list items and variations, that would also require a heavy effort to parse that information.
Personally, I’m not going to log in, or show my ID to any store I’m going to window shop, whether online or B&M.
If that’s the way they want to conduct business, I’ll just stop browsing AX, and the sellers will lose out on any possibility of an impulse buy.
Not going to bother complaining to AX’s circular-file-shaped suggestion box. But next time I do transact with a familiar and valued seller, I will note to them that this practice has an effect. AX may not heed sellers any more than it does buyers, but at least the seller will know why they’re not getting as much business from me.
Wellp, now that they’re hitting me with tax for everything, my ordering from them has waned quite a bit. They lost their competitive edge.
And their new “message center” sucks bollocks. I got a busted thermometer, sent a message to the seller, went to check to see if I got a reply yet… and now the message is gone!
They’ve gone downhill quite fast, if you ask me. And whoever designed their “new” website should be dragged out back and given a good old-fashioned biker-stomp.
Interesting. A coupla tracking sites (17track and track24, I think) now always default to ру́сский.
I can switch by clicking [EN], but never had to.
I’ve been having issues with FastTech, Arrow and some others. Till very recently couldn’t access certain pages, or some clickable elements weren’t responding. Thought it was some of the cookies can’t spill over to third party (using Tamper Monkey to selectively block third party data transfers). But even with the filters off, VPN off and straight from Chrome, the same (un)results.
I figured that there is a sporadic problem on the server side or my ISP. Not much I can do about it. Time has patched up the hiccups (putting it mildly - couldn’t search / purchase much on this computer). Used their Android apps for some - argh!
And so, if the AE Message Center doesn’t give any response, what other venue of inquiry?
Wow! All that drama and I'm just complaining of a “please slide to verify” unimportant bother from time to time. I'm feeling fortunate. O:)
It may be a good idea if someone, maybe myself, were to go contact customer service and provide them with a link to this thread.
Now that we're here, let me say the AliExpress search engine, like any other search engine without any kind of wild cards or search operators which also show lots of seemingly unrelated results, sucks.
Concerning the „message center“...
I used to communicate with sellers (e.g. Cissy from Sofirn, Simon from Convoy) very often. Now, even with the AX iPhone app, replies from sellers disappear out of a sudden while very old replies reappear as their latest answer. This is a real problem.
Like I said… biker-stomp.
’Fcourse, contact CS and everything’ll be, “No, no, no problem here. Check browser. Clear cache. Contact local post office and check.”, “Can you send video?”, etc.
Feh.
On my browser, it prompts me to install some DRM extension just to view images. And the constant CAPTCHA solving just to log in gets irritating. I seriously hope nobody here actually gives this website your credit card information, as if they can keep that secure. Use Paypal only. Protect yourself.
I do actually give them my credit card information.
I never actually save it on any site though. Why would you?
I’m convinced that this is not a problem caused by end-user cookie settings. It could be regional or a lot of things, but it’s not because of browser cookie settings. It doesn’t matter whether AliExpress maintains your login status or not; you still shouldn’t have to log in to view items or perform searches; that’s a requirement made by the server and is either a feature or a bug.
Though not an improvement, I’m actually not terribly disappointed in the new item pages because they are less busy, but things just don’t work as well as before and there’s simply no good reason to make people log in to browse your store. It’s not so much a privacy issue for me (it’s no trouble to track your browsing in-between logins) as it is an inconvenience and matter of principle.
Having seller messages disappear does take the cake and would put me off of AliExpress pretty quickly. Except for the recent PayPal issues, I’ve had a flawless buyer experience on AliExpress to date and even had productive conversations with sellers, so I hope that this trend doesn’t continue. I actually liked buying from AliExpress and don’t see any similar options that aren’t more expensive.
That somehow sounds :-D funny to me, but no idea what it actually means. May someone provide with a literal description of what a biker-stomp is? 
Maybe some sort of kick?
I think AliExpress' software engineering department, and of course all those who are in charge of taking related decisions, are a big herd of some strange animal tapping on keyboards at the pace of hortators. Or sort of. :-D
:))
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.
If you were to piss off someone in a motorcycle gang (hitting on his “old lady”, eg), the whole gang would drag you out to a back alley, parking lot, etc., throw you to the ground, and just start stomping on you as if you were on fire and they were nicely but enthusiastically trying to put it out.
Loads of laffs, actually.
Well, unless you’re the stompee.
I have been on Ali a couple times today and did not have to log in to see anything in particular. Seems to be working like normal from my PC.
Very true, really lame search engine compared to ebay's (for exemple)
Does anyone have any more thoughts/reasons causing AE to do this 
Might be that whole chobani thing, neh? That “good enough…” attitude.
Same with GB. I have a link to click for my orders individually or whole order history, and every every every time, it’s log in first, then go to an otherwise empty page listing just “You have no favorites”. Kill the tab, just reclick the same link as before (only now I’m “logged in”), and it displays the correct page. GB used to work perfectly before they redid their website.
With Amazon, and strangely AX, too, it goes to the correct page once you log in. (After all, you don’t want just any schmo looking at your order history.)
Of course, per this whole thread, AX is way more f’ed than anything else out there now, so…
I’m getting mixed results on AX all over the place. Sucky new versions of FF vs older portable FF, here and at work, that’s 4 different versions, and Hell if I can keep straight what works where and what quirks come up on which ones. In some cases, it’s been as bad as just getting the “framework” of an AX page but with zero content. Other cases, it comes up fine.
And Vipon, too. Zero results using an older browser, get results with a newer one. Wtf changed?!? New javascript spec? New tagging (not if results are spoon-fed to it server-side)? And it ain’t just in Asia. Memory Alpha (Star Track site) doesn’t even come up on this browser, just keeps pinwheeling as if the site’s down. Different browser, it comes right up. Again, wtf?!?
I don’t think it’s ever been this bad even in the early daze of Duh Innernet, and that was the Wild West in comparison.
And yes, I even suffered through the Frames Craze and flash-based websites <shudder/>.
[off-topic]
Frames… :person_facepalming:
or Internet Exploder completely ignoring W3C standards despite Microsoft having a seat on the committee… :disappointed:
I’ll bet there’s a number of us here that remember back to Compuserve… or at least AOHell.
I, for one, did not predict that GIF’s would make a comeback, though. Remember whole pages full of ’em and which could actually bring your all-powerful 486 machine to a crawl?
Not trying hijack my own thread 
.
[/off-topic]
Or the infamous Browser Wars.
“FrontPage ain’t done ’til Netscape won’t run!”
NS adhered to the standard.
Tables MUST be closed. So what did FP do when generating webpages? Open 7 tables and close only 6. Open 11 tables and close only 10.
NS would wait for the last open table to be closed before displaying anything (while MS/IE broke the standard and sneakily autoclosed the last table).
So you could get a long webpage with all the space reserved (even when hovering over an invisible link on a “blank” page it’d show the hand instead of pointer), only nothing would be displayed.
So NS was “broken”, and IE “worked”.
Vile, atrocious behavior.
Q: How many M$ employees does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. They just declare darkness the new “standard”.
Oh, and don’t get me started on “line terminator” vs “line separator”…