> “around every corner lies a brand you’ve never heard of, selling a product you’re not sure about”
And whenever you feel that, hop on AliExpress and find the exact same thing for about a tenth the price.
And whenever you feel that, hop on AliExpress and find the exact same thing for about a tenth the price.
3D printer parts do often pop up on Amazon 1-2 months after Ali for 5-10% extra. I think many sellers on Aliexpress are aware of the true price people are willing to pay and charge close to that. And then someone does the arbitrage on Amazon close to that.
Now if you want to see a "real" good price, go to Taobao and cough up for the MOQ of 1000, that's 1/10th in my niche.
In my experience, it's not that bad. I usually get all my stuff within a couple weeks to a month.
Also you have to pay a lot of money for a Prime subscription, and even then Amazon doesn't consistently hit its two day shipping targets (IIRC Amazon without Prime gets you something like no-rush shipping, which takes like week).
I keep hearing this, and I've started looking on AliExpress, and the prices are only a little bit cheaper, but the shipping takes forever.
Like I recently was looking into desk globes, and the first one that popped up in search is $16 on AliExpress with 4-week shipping, or $20 on Amazon with 1-day shipping:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256802137627481.html
https://www.amazon.com/TTKTK-Decorative-Geography-Educationa...
And this seems pretty representative. I've never found a single case where it was worth it to buy with AliExpress. Especially since I know I can return anything on Amazon pretty effortlessly, whereas with AliExpress I have no idea.
$10.49 + $5.16 shipping ($15.65) for 5x https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805076529896.html?spm=a2g...
$1.50 + $2.59 shipping ($4.09) for 1x https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803289357326.html?spm=a2g...
Literally the exact same thing.
I tend to use AliExpress for small electronic doodads and things like battery boxes. I'm not some AliExpress wizard, but I don't think the shipping is fixed per item (and I'm usually ordering several) and I think sometimes they batch orders together (which may lower the shipping price?). I don't know how to get a breakdown of the shipping cost I actually paid, which is one of the things that annoys me about the site.
Just because when a product has virtually no reviews, the price is often temporarily crazy cheap (including on Amazon) as they're just trying to get people to buy and review it in the first place. Or it's basically a scam listing with a crazy high price so nobody's touching it except for a few people who aren't paying attention. So unpopular products don't make for a great comparison.
IIRC, AliExpress lists items by "shop," and it honestly it doesn't seem like the listings last very long for stuff like this. I have no reason to believe any one of them are "better," so I just buy from the cheapest one.
Even for Amazon listings for stuff like this, the listing come and go. For that AA power bank, this is the one I got initially (7 years ago), but the listing is no longer active: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HCBHZV2/. It had 97 reviews.
However, in this category, I tend to ignore reviews. None of the products are high quality or objectively good, but they're cheap enough (especially on AliExpress) that I'm fine taking the risk.
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Here's another comparison for something else I know about
$13.79 for 1x: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013FANC9W/
$1.88 + $2.44 shipping ($4.36) for 1x https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832834613884.html?spm=a2g...
I'll have to keep an eye out now -- maybe it's more about cheap electronics? The products I've usually been comparing have usually been more home/office/kitchen type stuff.
Thanks again!