with the hundreds of orders over the last 1-2 years I have only had problems twice both ebay sellers from china . one they sent the wrong items then tried to get me to buy more stuff so they could send the right stuff [ scam ] and the other was fake or bad transistors both low dollar items and ebay took care of it .
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Aliexpress once stepped in on an order when I was asked by a seller to confirm that I had received a product I had ordered with him in advance of actually receiving it. He assured me I shouldn’t worry and it would definately arrive and he explained that he asked me to do so so that he would get the money for the product from aliexpress and because he was low on cash and could not cover postage costs would then be able to send products to other people.
Obviously I thought that the request was dodgy to say the least and I was never going to comply.
I had 2 emails from aliexpress that day and the second one was from Aliexpress staff apologizing and stepping in and telling me that 1: the seller had been given the boot and 2: they had refunded the money to me immediately.
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It looks cool. Sir, could you share the development file if this is your layout?
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Hi, as this thread comes up, I would like to make a quick feedback.
AliExpress: clearly worth it.
I buy all my veroboards, potentiometer knobs, jacks, cables, plugs, patches, switches, silicone wire…
I managed to source polystyrene caps (did not try them tho), all kind of boxes…
As of now, I did have no problem with ICs. I purchased MC1496P, LM358, PT2399.
Ali is clearly one of my main suppliers for maaaaany goods.
If you want me to share the good stuff I found, please let me know!
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prices are good if you have the time , shipping takes a loonnggg time to the upper mid west U.S. but thats usually cheap to .
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I’ve been a regular AliExpress shopper for years, from my perspective, if you are a knowledgeable customer, the pros greatly outweigh the cons. But if you’re easily the scammed type, you’re walking into the sleaziest flea market ever.
First of all, for most goods (not just electronics), regular online shopping has gone to hell. Amazon no longer offers reputed brands, they offer the exact same stuff as Aliexpress, but for a 3x~5x markup. The only difference is that Amazon will ship it faster and is guaranteed to take returns. Why not get it straight from China then?
(Of course, Amazon is an absurdly bad deal for electronics, often by a factor of 10x. I cringe at everyone trying to monetize stuff like instructables posts by adding Amazon links to buy a box of 50 generic capacitors for €13)
Regular shopping has gone to hell even more so if you are in France, or most of the European Union. Recent laws made it so even small purchases will always require you to pay customs. The taxes aren’t much, the problem is that shipping companies tack on surcharges for collecting them from you. God help you if you receive a package from DHL, there might be €10 worth of goods in it, but they’ll still charge you like €40 to receive it.
Everyone here raves about Tayda (Thailand) and Thonk (Brexitland), but it’s impossible to buy from them from France under those conditions.
AliExpress is one of the rare Chinese shops that has done all the paperwork to collect the customs themselves, which really helps keep the costs down. (JLCPCB is another relevant shop that has done the same)
I kickstarted my entire electronics atelier from zero using Aliexpress this year, and 90% of my purchases were satisfactory. For the remaining 10%, it’s a numbers game, I get so many good deals it’s ok to have the occasional dud. It’s particularly great for getting assortments of components. Having stocks of a bit of everything was a major hurdle to get started. Buying a wide assortment from a big supplier like Mouser means you get terrible prices and a ton of extraneous packaging.
Some random advice I have to buy from Aliexpress:
- Everything is sold by individual vendors, nothing by Aliexpress themselves.
- Treat every vendor less than 3 years old with suspicion.
- Generic and unpronounceable shop names are very often actually legit.
- Take the 2nd number of their percentage rating as a rating out of 10. A shop with a 94% rating means a 4/10 shop. Avoid buying from shops under 96%.
- Product reviews are heavily rigged. Some vendors straight up bundle in their order a card that say they offer “rebates” if you give them 5 stars then contact them. Most buyers will give 5 stars simply for receiving the stuff. "Arrived good has not test yet
" is the most common review ever. - Look at the shop’s page if they have anything else you need, it’s often a better deal on shipping to buy things from fewer vendors.
- Nothing goes on sale ever. The price you see if the price you can get all year. “40% off” means nothing. The 11/11 sale means nothing. The Black Friday and Chinese New Year sales mean nothing. The final price you pay never changes much. They just mark up the goods then add big rebates.
- Always sort results by amount of orders.
- All the gamified aspects of the marketplace (like coins) are a time-wasting scam. You will never get better deals.
- If you buy only one, look for free shipping: if you are eligible for a refund, you’re not refunded the shipping costs. If you buy multiples, pay for separate shipping, and on checkout, AliExpress will try to “optimize” your shipping options. Note that it might “optimize” it in its favor, so check your options manually and play with the quantities to get the best deal.
- The sellers do not know what it is they sell. It’s pointless to ask for details. They will tell you “Dear friend it is suitable for electronics” and that’s it. However, any info they put on the item page will generally be correct: if it isn’t, and you can point out a discrepancy, AliExpress will side with you in a dispute.
- AliExpress will generally side with you in disputes.
- If a vendor offers to refund you via paypal, refuse, and demand the refund be done via AliExpress. Via PayPal, you’re guaranteed they will revert the transaction later, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
- If they ask you for an additional fee after purchase, just ignore it and wait it out.
- By sticking to highly rated shops, you won’t run into those scams in the first place.
- When you have to talk to a vendor, it will go through machine translation. Be polite, but very direct. Make short sentences. You want your point to come across through the translation. Do not say “The product didn’t work, can we reach an agreement how to make this right?”, it will come out as gibberish on their end. Say “The product didn’t work. I want a refund. Thank you!”. It might seem brusque, but you’re guaranteed it will be translated unambiguously. They’re used to it, nobody on the other end will be offended.
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This sounds like good, sensible, and exhaustive advice from someone who has had to document their own dealings.
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Thank you for this excellent tutorial for Ali!
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I pretty much got all my TL074’s from Aliexpress but in my latest projects I found that they did not behave well and that cost me quite some time. Swapping them for a decent one (from Reichelt), I managed to fix the issue. So from now on, I will not be bothered to use Ali’s cheap opamps anymore. I’m still happy with all the resistors and (non-electrolytic) capacitors that I can buy there. Also had no issues with the LM13700’s I bought there too.
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Based on what I’ve read, ICs from AE are a crapshoot. Depending on the vendor, or even varying within the stock of one vendor, they might be fine, they might be garbage. One thing’s for sure, when you see for instance DIP AD633s, parts that Analog Devices sells for $8.03 in quantities of 1000+, offered for $1.70 each, you know those are not genuine new first quality Analog Devices parts. Maybe they’re used or seconds or knockoffs that will work well enough, maybe they’re counterfeits that won’t work at all. You can’t tell until you buy. And even TL07x chips are absolutely not immune from counterfeiting. The other thing is delivery time, which can be glacial especially at the lowest rates; that makes AE best for replenishing my stash, not so much for getting parts needed for a specific build I want to get done soon. I stick with Tayda, Digi-Key, and occasionally Mouser for nearly all my semiconductors and most other components and go to AE mainly for stuff like knobs and LEDs.
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I also order parts from Ali quite frequently (less so for my electronics work, come to think of it). I agree with all of this advice.
One thing I’d like to add is that generally shops that sell a hodgepodge of random and unrelated items (for example hair combs, drone rotors, doorstops, pink frilly Happy Meal toys) are likely to be legitimate because they’re selling whatever they could get their hands on cheap from the factory.
Trust your instincts and NEVER sort by price low-high.
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As someone who uses Ali regularly, I can say that the more fancy things you need the bigger the gamble it is. I mostly buy components in THT format and for passive stuff like caps (ceramic), resistors, connectors, prototyping boards, wires, LEDs, sockets and other stuff that doesn’t have more than one key characteristic Aliexpress is good.
Diodes (not LEDs) like 1n4148 and similar are safe to buy there and Zener voltage references usually work. Other semiconductors like transistors are in a gamble territory, they will usually work in a circuit but you will never know if they same characteristics as a part they appear to be. However, the most dodgiest (meaning worst) that happened to me was the pin swap on the tl431 programmable voltage reference where pins 1 and 3 were swapped but the part still worked after a quick fix.
Some ICs will also work but you must search for listings with the most amount of orders made, there is also some stuff that won’t work no matter what, like for example LM13700s. I have ordered from about 5 or more different sellers and all of them are dead/fake and after checking them they will always fry protection on my test boards (working ones won’t do that, so it is not a problem with my setup). Personally, I wouldn’t buy anything other that tl074/72/71
As for the “mechanical” parts like pots, switches, rotary switches and buttons Ali is good for smaller numbers (like up to 100). I only buy wh148 pots (panel mount stuff) so if you want ALPS or something looking like them then you better of somewhere else. As for jack, if you use a big one then you better estimate the amount you need and order them on TME or somewhere similar because there aren’t really good deals on this site.
So to sum things up, If you need to be 110% sure about your parts (ie you need NC0 caps, 0,1% tolerant resistors, that one IC sub-line that is slightly different than the main thing or fancy semiconductor ) then you should buy from more professional stores.
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In about 5 years of using AliExpress I’ve had about 6 or 7 bad experiences. I buy a lot from AliExpress as here in the Ukraine it’s not easy to get electronic parts without huge import and postage fees from the likes of mouser etc. So they are my last resort over AliExpress.
I’ve had 2 counterfeit parts, LM309K voltage regulators and CA3080 OTA chips (refunded). Other than that it’s been failure to deliver, failure to refund and one logic analyzer that failed when I tried to use it first time and they refused a refund. Another problem is they advertise as having parts and you order and then you get a message to say actually we don’t have them. A bit annoying then reordering with another supplier and awaiting a refund.
So I’m down about $150 in 6 years of using them. It’s not nice but what can I do, they are impossible to talk to and I don’t have many other options, the local electronics store here just resells stuff they have purchased in bulk from AliExpress and then there is one really good store but again it’s a long wait if they don’t have stock.
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One thing that’s also worth noting about AliExpress, Ebay, and similar marketplaces, is to be very wary of buying old chips that are no longer in production.
There’s an (absurdly long) video about a chip I love, the YM2612, which hasn’t been in production for decades, but can be still be easily sourced from old Mega Drive consoles, and thus, can still be bought for a few dollars per unit.
The TL;DW: recycling of chips is done with exploitative labor practices and poor concern for the health of workers, most vendors will lie to your face and claim they are new straight from the factory when they haven’t been in production for decades, the chips you will get will have their leads re-tinned and their markings re-printed, most of the chips you will receive will actually work but you will have no way to know which revision you got, and how long that chip has been in service (if it came from an arcade cab, it might have seen years of daily operation)
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I got some “fake” 2n3904 transistors from Ali. They were still NPN, but they were BC557s (I think), so the pinout was different. Lots of banging my head on the table with that one.
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I was looking into DAC modules to use with a teensy. Ofcourse there is the standard teensy audio shield, but that one is much more expensive than the UDA1334A here on Aliexpress.
Do you guys trust the quality of such breakout boards or not?
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I have used an adafruit version of this thing succesfully, but I can’t find how much I paid for it or where I got it from at the moment… got it from here:
I believe the adafruit version is discontinued so I don’t really have that option 
It’s appears to be and likely is identical to the AdaFruit version, for which they make the design files available.
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