I think I am going to sneak in the AliExpress customer service and file a general complaint. I am going to be raw with them, respectful but rough. Frankly speaking, their site is full of shite… Mmm 0K, that's a bit hard, but you get the idea.
I will take some time to write it up, so I have it precooked before sneaking in. Things which are going to be laid on the table are:
The search engine. Starting with the default listing filter, “best match”, which honestly, should be renamed to “worst match”. One of the main problems with the search engine is that it makes stupid presumptions, one of the worst is presuming that the given search terms in the search box can be found inside other terms, which is terribly foul. If you try to find a "2W zener diode", for example, you'll have the search listing completely spammed with "1/2W" parts. This is just an example more or less recently I had to deal with, but it happens with LOTS of other stuff. Also, the lack of search operators is grievous (nothing works better than a search engine with logic operators, and free from any sort of syntax correction AI crap, imho).
…
If any of you has something to suggest and I resound with it, it'll go in.
Fact is, I'm not sure their customer support team is straight willing to submit true customer complaints to whoever is in charge of the decisions. Maybe too much foul fears. Just look at how hard it can be to reach customer service in the first place (you need to input a bunch of smart lies to their Eva bot). Which is sad, very sad.
I just made some purchases at AliExpess a couple hours ago, in fear and trembling. Originally, I ordered 4 items from 4 different sellers that all accepted PayPal, but the PayPal button was greyed out when I attempted to purchase them all at once. So I stupidly tried my credit card, and the fraud outfit tied to my bank flagged it and denied each purchase attempt. I had to purchase each of the items separately with PayPal, then carefully cancel the original order one item at a time, and then let the fraud agency know the purchase attempt was legit. Nerve wracking. Now I just have to wait two months before I see this stuff. But at least I got a great price on KeepPower IMR18650 3500mAh 10A cells, best I have see anywhere by a few dollars.
Now that nocturne relived the thread, I went back to re-check the site. It is not asking me to “verify” like the other day, although this doesn't means the problem is fixed.
As another example of AE problems, take a look at the following 26700 LiFePO4 cells advertisement:
These are the same as the Lii-40E ones recently reviewed by Henrik, if only in their OEM wrap. If you pay some attention you will notice that the price for a 4-piece pack is wrong, corresponding to a 3-pack instead. I told this to the seller months ago by now (past July 7th, in fact) and, along with some other related seller advertisements, the error is still there! :facepalm:
Just to add another helpful tip: while I have been shopping on Aliexpress for many years, I have never entered any of my personal cards on there. I trust Aliexpress (not 1¢ was taken fraudulently from me in all the years). But I wouldn’t trust them with my American Express.
hence, I encourage everyone to use prepaid cards in your locality, like:
The Revolut disposable cards also work fine on AE.
All I can say is… those are really cool cells. Nice to see LiFePO4 getting some love.
Really good idea. Luckily, my bank is OCD with security and questionable purchases, and I just don’t have much money to be stolen, my monthly allotment is generally gone to bills within a week of getting paid. I checked to make certain, and AliExpess did not record my card number for future purchases. But it is possible the sellers saw my numbers, but I hope cancelling the orders during the fraud freeze warning I got was sufficient to remove any possible curiosity. If not, my bank sends a new card, cancelling the old one, about once a year.
But that does leave a window for fraud. I have been meaning to set up using virtual card numbers for one time use. It is really just educating myself how to generate them.
Anyway, I won’t do that again. It is PayPal or no purchase.
Using a 1-time virtual credit card is probably one of the safest ways to go. Set it for the purchase amount with an expiration date of a day or 2 in the future and even if someone hacks into the site the card number is of no value to them. Also prevents in-house employees from using the card for personal use.
Just to add: AE will have some part of your financial information, regardless of whether you “save” the card in your profile or not. In case of fraud, charge back, refund or the seller simply doesn’t ship (happens more frequently now) - AliExpress needs to send the money back to your account. More specifically, Antgroup will do this for you (all the “tiny” payments we all have been doing made them 200B $US big).
I have never seen any type of fraud with credit cards with Ant financial, so far. They seem “safe”, but you never know. Data breaches can happen in any country.
Are you having problems changing the default language of the AliExpress website? :| I do. I always switched to the default english website when possible, and selected english as language. However, right now even if I do these things the website still shows me stuff in spanish, because of locale I guess; clearing cookies doesn't helps.
Yes. These are already old bugs, randomly changing locale.
Search also gets random results for same keyword, sometimes 404, sometimes not taking into account filters.
Prices in search are random too, sometimes they include vat, sometimes not, so you cannot really adjust filter price manually because you dont know which version of the price you will get.
Not much you can do unfortunately.
Here’s 2 cents for people unfamiliar with CHN e-commerce companies, or any CHN online businesses in general, from someone who frequently spends time there:
Let’s imagine, that Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, Booking…stops providing support for desktop pages, and kinda force you to use their iOS or Android apps if you wanna use their full services. Can you imagine that?
That is exactly what’s happening with CHN internet. Or shall we say intranet, given their level of blockades and censorship.
We all know the majority of online businesses make the majority of $$$ (¥¥¥) by selling user data / providing targeted ad services. The thing with desktop vs. mobile app is that it’s so much easier for them to harvest so much more and so much deeper data from mobile apps than from desktop pages, so some Chinese online businesses only keep a half-hearted skeleton crew to run their desktop pages, while others provide nothing but a QR code for mobile app download if you try to access from a computer.
Even worse, it’s actually in CHN gov’s best (short term) interest to allow top companies (Alibaba, parent company of Aliexpress; Tencent, parent company of WeChat, etc) to gather as much and as detailed user data as possible, since all entities are required by law to hand over whatever data the gov asks for. Thus, CHN gov is more than reluctant to carry out any regulations in terms of domestic privacy protection. However, they’re extremely sensitive when it comes to transferring / storing data abroad. Word is Tencent will very soon be fined a record amount, somewhere around 1.5 - 3 billion USD equivalence, for transferring user data abroad “without permission”.
In CHN, privacy protection is a pathetic joke that CHN people themselves laugh about all the time. It’s one of their own “Soviet jokes”.
I’m not praising or judging anything here. I’m just stating a fact.
What bothers me the most is that you can’t reach the customer service anymore. Their bot gives you useless standard answers and is unable to resolve any problems. It can just check orders and tell you things you already know.
Not long ago it was still possible to reach a person from the customer service.
I use my smartphone absolutely most of the time (if not all of it) vs my desktop computer, but not the usual ways. I minimize app usage and browse in desktop mode as much as possible. I run a customized ROM and of course I am root. This doesn't means I am bad in any way, but as usual the involved propaganda makes people believe in wrong ways. This is a projection of my self-sovereignty. Running a stock ROM without superuser rights means you get @#$% with all sorts of pestering notifications and other limitations, and surely I don't allow such crap.
@#$%!
Governments are evil entities, did you know? Actual worldwide government is carried out in masonic lodges and etc., but this is another story. O:)
There are customer service representatives willing to help there. Just tell Eva “error” a few times and it will quickly give you the option to speak to a human. :-)
I didn’t think it would work that way. I spend a few minutes in the chat messing around with the bot, selected the same order again and wrote error until I was connected to a real person.
