Any experience with Aliexpress.com purchases?

I am getting ready to purchase some antennas (cellular, wifi and lora) from Aliexpress. I have never purchased from them before. Does anyone have any experience? Is it safe? I assume the product quality will very depending on the vendor.

Thoughts?

The good news is AliExpress uses escrow, so you pay AliExpress at the time of order, if you don’t get the goods you tell them and they don’t pay the vendor. A little while ago there was a vendor who had micro quadcopters up and many from the forum here signed up. The vendor asked for us to confirm receipt quickly so he could fix his cash flow; if anyone did that then they would have lost their money, but anyone who didn’t lost very little (currency exchange fluctuations basically, for anyone not using $US).

I’ve used AliExpress successfully myself for things like stepper motors and other pieces, without concern.

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I’ve ordered bulk components and tools from Alibaba and a dozen or so one-off items from AliExpress and never had a problem. That said, I am fairly picky about using vendors with longer histories and better ratings. There are escrow services available for Alibaba, though I have not bothered with that so far.

EDIT: Brett is right - escrow is kind of built into Aliexpress With Alibaba, it’ a separate service.

I also ordered a couple of times and all worked out well with good support from suppliers.

AliExpress is a great place to find some cool stuff and the escrow method means you will get your goods before the supplier gets paid, so far less chance of being ripped off.

I’ve used them a number of times and great service from the vendors I’ve used.

I ordered about half of my parts for my printer from AliExpress. I found the delivery to take somewhat longer than eBay on average, but the experience was very similar. Everything came eventually as was exactly the quality you’d expect.

I use them often. Can confirm above statements. If I buy parts below 11USD there is no tax on import to DK and many parts for prototypes fall below this threshold. Furthermore there is free shipping on many parts.

Thanks everyone for your comments. It gave me the assurance I needed. I placed an order for some Lora and cellular antennas. We will see what happens.

Thanks!

I have placed 2 orders at AliExpress so far.
One was delivered without any Problems.
The 2nd one the Company who sold the stuff tried to rip me (and others) off, by asking for a delivery confirmation before he send it out.
The Company was suspended on AliExpress because of this and I got my Money back.
The only “Trouble” with the working shipment was customs.
I had to pay it to the delivery guy who had no Change and did not speak a single work german or english (in Germany).
So he had to come back the next day when I got the amount right.

Did that happen to be a drone?

Wow, your threshold is lower than the US$50 here. Trouble with this place is that they add duty (varies), vat (10%) and income tax (7.5%) to anything above $50 and the shipping cost is included in that price. It’s not worth buying things that are just over $50 as the handling charge from the couriers doubles the price you pay for the goods. I prefer to purchase more and then the cost is more spread out.

Yes, exactly that one.

Well, I placed my order Aug 9 and it arrived today, Aug 12. Pretty darn good if you ask me. I payed for DHL but I still wasn’t expecting it until next week. Everything was there that I ordered.

The only thing missing was my 915Mhz antenna’s that I originally went there to find. They weren’t there because I forgot to order them! :wall: :wall: I must have forgotten to add them to the basket. I got so hung up on the cellular antennas and the ordering process I forgot.

One of the antennas I ordered covers the 900Mhz band so it will probably be good enough for testing.

Thanks again for all the information.

As I have dug into one the parts, a magnetic antenna base, I have found a problem. It looks like it originally had 2 antenna cables coming from it and they just cut one off and stuffed the end back into the base. I would assume this is not the besting thing for an RF antenna circuit to have a stub hanging out there. Potentially with the braid touching the center conductor.

Oh well, its China. Buyer beware.

I order stuff from them pretty regularly. A lot of sellers have inaccurate or intentionally misleading item descriptions (like “free shipping” even though there is no free shipping) and aliexpress won’t do anything about it. But the built-in escrow system seems to work well enough, problems are rare, and I’ve never had a problem that hasn’t been corrected.