There’s no question you can get decent stuff on AE. But that isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about crap customer service in the all to frequent times an order goes wrong. (And a crappy website.)
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I’m probably shielded from the crappy user experience, because I use very aggressive mitigation software. No popups, fairly smooth purchase path, tolerable communications. I’m going in with my customer service expectations very low. I’m grateful for threads like this which, over time, have forewarned me.
Yesterday I had my first major run-in with AliExpress customer service. I had used PayPal for purchases so far, but this is not ideal because my own privacy rules led to a laborious login process. My attempts to move to direct card-based payment have resulted in my being thrown into the merciless teeth of the appeals machinery. On balance I think I’ll just learn to live with PayPal. The alternative would involve a flagrant breech of my privacy.
I’ve just had a run in with a seller on AliExpress, I ordered 9x RP2350 boards, order was accepted but never shipped, I logged in and saw messages from the seller telling me his postage charges were not enough to cover the costs and I should send him $10 via PayPal.
Let’s just say I told him where to go and the items are no in a refund process.
It’s upto the seller to set a price for the goods and the postage and the buyer accepts it, if the seller got it wrong then that’s there problem, not mine.
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I was on Tayda today, and they DO do a limited range of 0.1% 1/4W resistors.
On a different note, I spent days adding stuff to my shopping basket ( I was logged in to Tayda) and then the contents suddenly disappeared. Deleted. Wiped. Zilch. Anyone else had this problem with Tayda?
As for AliExpress, there is so much obviously counterfeit stuff on sale you have to realise you are dealing with fraudsters a lot of the time.
Link? I can’t find any
Edit: found them.
https://www.taydaelectronics.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=0.1%25
Hasn’t happened to me, but then I tend to use wishlists more than shopping carts for stuff I’m not going to order immediately.
This more likely is a result of how shopping carts typically operate. Your cart is often stored server-side paired off with a session cookie. If you cleared out your browser cache or that session expired, thats prolly why, and not something special with how tayda’s ecommerce site operates.
one of my favorite things about tayda is that if i forget to log in, it merges my cart with my saved one once I remember to do so.
Thanks for this information. However, my shopping basked contents suddenly disappeared completely while I was updating the quantity of one item. I was logged in to my account.
Generally I like Tayda but they have not responded to my Ticket I logged several days ago.
Anyway, just a heads up for anyone who orders through Tayda.
Its likely your token expired. This stuff isn’t magic or malicious. It can take some time for tickets, give at least a week for a response.
I’ve done some 1000+ purchases since 2015 via aliexpress and I’ve found that almost all the time you get what you order (and the quality corresponds to the cost). If I didn’t get what was advertised I always got a refund. Less than 5 % of the time my purchase just didn’t arrive at all and then too I always got my money back.
However, I’ve found that ordering integrated circuits can sometimes be problematic. But this may just depend on the type of IC. Amongst others I’ve ordered opamps (I’ve posted pictures of those on this forum) and they turned out to not work properly. E.g. of 4 opamps in a chip only 3 worked. I’ve ordered TL071 which are single opamp chips and found that they contained 2 opamps, so they more resembled a TL072, although they were clearly branded as TL071.
I’ve ordered a handfull of STM32 bluepills and so far have been lucky to always get working specimens although on the MIAW discord I read of people receiving quite a few problematic ones. But I’ve also ordered less ‘common’ ICs like buffers e.g. 74HC595 and multiplexers like the MCP23017 and they all worked perfectly.
I guess it is easier to sell an inferior opamp as a high grade one and get away with it, because in quite a few situations it will work similarly, and there are many types of opamps that can fit as a ‘replacement’. So I’ve decided to buy my opamps elsewhere.
Of course it is easy to dismiss aliexpress as a service because of such mishaps, but I think that the sellers are plenty, not all of them are rotten apples and given the price I pay locally (buy 1 resistor or cap in a local shop for 1 Euro or more than 100 at aliexpress for less!!), I’m not taking that much of a financial gamble when ordering parts with 2 suppliers hoping that I get one set of properly working devices.
Almost all of the ICs I bought were thru hole devices. And I can imagine that SMD devices are more difficult to ‘rebrand’. My SMD purchases always checked out to be the real deal, my THT purchases not always (but I want to stress again that often they did).
I’m wondering whether people have had less ‘fakes’ delivered to them when they ordered SMD integrated circuits than when ordering Tru Hole integrated circuits.
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24/24 in the last month from Ali have turned up and been as expected.
It’s either Ali or Ebay and although the sellers may even be the same, the speed seems to be better than ebay and prices cheaper.
if i buy 3 lots of something from Ali and 2 did not turn up then it would probably be the same cost as UK Ebay or Amazon ( not that you can buy much on amazon )
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I can’t even comprehend how that’s allowed to happen in a moden democracy with legislation and process.
Still on a roll with Ali, another 10 parcels without issue. Bought my sone some clone of a building block set and it’s incredible what you can get , yet to see if the quality is any good…
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That isn’t anymore since a few weeks…
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I can currently get €150 euros of goods into Ukraine for personal use without tax. So I tailor my orders to suit. The Ukrainian government now want to reduce this to €45 so making it more expensive, I will have to stagger orders to meet the €45 euro limit or they add them together and tax you. Plus postage will be added to every package as I use a 3rd party to get them into Ukraine. So instead of 1 package I need 3 to do the same thing.
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That’s interesting… two totally opposite ways of thinking !
In France they want (nothing is done) to tax packages UNDER €150, so people agreggate their orders to avoid too many small packages and all the pollution associated with a guy coming to your home with a truck to deliver a package containing 20 push-pins worth €0.20 with free shipping… and again the next day with the staples…
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