Aliexpress is a marketplace for about 80,000 sellers to offer their goods worldwide. Most sellers are very reliable and helpful. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of shady sellers and a small percentage are scammers.
Disputes can help you in case something goes wrong. But it’s better to avoid disputes by selecting good and reliable sellers in the first place.
Here are some tips that will help you reduce your number of disputes.
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if you do a search for a product, order by number of orders, not by price. Select a store from the top sellers.
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If you go for the lowest price instead, chances increase of something going wrong.
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price differences can have many reasons but often there is a quality difference even if the product listing seems identical. Perhaps one seller ships your item well packaged, another seller ships it without any protection at all, causing your item to arrive broken. Or the shipping method is different.
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if the price is too good to be true, it usually is. The seller might ship a different item, a refurbished item or not ship at all.
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the store should have a rating of >98%
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One small tip. Take the store rating and remove the 9. Take the number that is left as a score out of 10. E.g. a rating of 97% is 7/10 which is still quite good, but a rating of 94% is only 4/10 which is quite bad
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the store should be open for at least one year. Two years is even better.
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scammers tend to open a stores for a short time and disappear when negative feedback starts to appear on their store
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check the store feedback history. This shows the feedback from all buyers, even for products that ware taken down.
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The 5 star feedbacks will not help you much to judge a store, as many buyers tend to give 5 star scores by default.
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Look at the 1-3 star reviews instead. These will tell you if the seller uses fake tracking numbers, sends faulty products, doesn’t respond to messages or cheats on customers in other ways. Every store will have a few bad reviews about products not arriving, those are normal and can be ignored if there are not too many.
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After selecting your store, also don’t forget to check the reviews of the product you want to buy. Again, you will probably learn more from the 1 – 3 star reviews than from the 5 star reviews. If there’s anything wrong with the product, you will learn it there. Also check the additional reviews, these will tell you if a product breaks after a little while.
