AliExpress can offer great deals, but it’s also very easy to get scammed, receive a cheap knock-off, or even end up with nothing at all. The search engine isn’t very helpful, often mixing reputable merchants with sketchy ones and real products with junk.
So far, I’ve found the AliUp extension, which seems fairly helpful. I wish there were third-party websites with independent reviews, but I haven’t found anything truly helpful or comprehensive yet.
So, what are your tips for buying on AliExpress or similar platforms?
Well, depends on how much you’re OK with some problems. I knowingly bought a “2 TB (64 GB Extended)” flash drive, tested its sectors and reprogrammed it to 32-in-64-GB for wear leveling and bad sector avoidance because it was still a cheap 32GB USB drive. I made sure to label it for “non-critical use” such as movies.
As for camping lanterns, ones charged from mains might have a nasty habit of shocking their users. (The YouTube channel contains a huge number of cheap Chinese charger teardowns and most don’t meet safety criteria. Usually, there is just 1 or 2 layers of thin tape between mains and the output you can touch.)
You can even have that flash drive for free if you claim it wasn’t sold as advertised!
It was advertised as “2 TB (64 GB Extended)” at a local clearance sale (not AliExpress), which was basically correct though I would prefer “64 GB but misprogrammed so everything can get corrupted at any time”. When buying it, I didn’t yet know if I could reprogram the chip but the low price was justified for the pretty aluminum case with a USB-C port and place for a custom PCB. I decided to buy it also to prevent another, less technical person from using it and losing their data. The store was getting rid of inventory for very cheap and would close soon so no more fake drives would be ordered.