@sj_h1 I have ordered a lot form AliExpress, Amazon, and a bit from eBay.

My experience is as follows for Ali.

1. Mostly cheaper but do your research.

2. Quality is the same as these are the same products you get on Amazon. One factory many sellers.

3. Delivery is slow, from a few weeks to a couple months.

4. Never needed help other than missing/late shipments.

5. I did have a couple items I got that were different, but it was my fault for not reading.

6. Shipping costs are fully disclosed, I have never been surprised. You can filter for free shipping but that may be a lot more expensive than paying a small shipping charge on a much cheaper product.

7. Any refund or return has been handled as good or better than Amazon, and in the couple cases where I wanted to do a return they refunded my money and told me to keep the goods.

I Highly recommend AliExpress.

As far as Amazon, I have so many orders I can't archive any more. I only recently had a bad experience with Amazon, and after several days and many phone calls won my case. I often will order 1 from Amazon to get it quickly, then order a few from AliExpress.

I highly recommend Amazon

As far as eBay, for us Canadians, the shipping/cross border issues and return policy makes it very uncompetitive so I rarely even check the price on eBay.

For Canadians, I do NOT recommend eBay.

BangGood is just AliExpress for more money but shorter shipping costs (it's even the same website as Ali)

BangGood is a good trade-off between price and shipping speed.

Hi @sj_h1,

  I generally agree it with what Ron @zander has said, but maybe one or two twists. Note, I am in UK, which may change a few things.

I am not clear if Banggood is related to AliExpress, but:

• they behave differently. Banggood has warehouses in some countries, including the UK, so some things arrive in a few days. As these items ship from within the country, it seems any customs issues are resolved before you order. This may or may not affect you. Sadly, only a small proportion of items appear in the UK warehouse.
• Banggood seems to have an in-house brand Geekcreit .. I don't know the relationship, if any, but I have only ever spotted Geekcreit on Banggood, and it makes up a substantial part of the small electronic boards, etc on Banggood. Few Geekcreit bits I bought seemed to be well designed and built.
• The AliExpress and Bangood websites in UK do not look alike .. whether they share a common software base, I have no idea.

Ebay in UK can be useful ... there are a number of small importers who carry stock of common parts who can deliver in 2-3 days. Obviously they apply a price markup, but sometimes it is very modest, and for 1-off pricing, it can make more sense. I wouldn't generally use it for direct ship from China vendors.

AliExpress postage costs can indeed exceed the goods price

• ... but if you are patient and a bit cunning, you can often get a reasonable result, providing the goods are small and light.
• buying several different parts from the same vendor often results in a smaller postage bill than the sum of postage costs of the individual items. You need to play games on the order page, switching items on and off, whilst watching the total bill.
• Sometimes the postage costing algorithm seems very weird ... increasing quantity from 1 upwards is rarely linear, and sometimes has major jumps at more than say 3 of an item.
• Hence, goods cost and postage costs are clearly intertwined with many vendors ... but don't take what it says on the individual goods description page as the 'last word' ... follow it through to the order page and be prepared to juggle between vendors and quantities if you want (say) 6 widgets which are available from at least 4 different vendors.
• For the UK at least, many items are labelled something like "15-day delivery on £9". This means, if you have  goods totalling £9 or more, all of which have this label, then they get a double bagging ... that is each vendor puts their bits in a bag, and then the bags of all the vendors in this category get assembled in a second bag, which is then airlifted, and generally appears within around two weeks as stated.
  • The goods can be chosen from multiple vendors, which is useful.
  • The £9 only refers to the cost of the goods, not postage, or any other taxes added on later. The total bill may be more like £20 to make the £9 threshold.
  • This means, vendors with low prices and high postage costs can be less favourable to the buyer, even if the total goods + postage is the same.
  • Only some goods qualify .. but they are easy to spot.
• Amazon generally does what it claims, and if the item is in an Amazon warehouse, then it is the quickest. I don't think I have ever tested the returns system, but no reason to believe it shouldn't work. It is usually expensive for small electronic bits, presumably because of overhead costs on things costing less than a few pounds. So whilst I use it fairly regularly, it is not often for small electronic components.

Whether any of this applies to you, I don't know. Clearly, different countries have different situations. This was just a view from the UK.

Best  wishes, Dave

@davee I did some digging and indeed Banggood appears to be a separate company. The reason I thought they were connected is that certain parts of their website are identical to the Ali group. BUT not everything, my apologies for my faulty memory.

One of the differences in Banggood is they have NO 3rd party goods and have a 30 day return policy (AliExpress is generally 75 days)

The 'trick' with AliExpress is you need to spend quite a bit of time checking not only the prices of the goods but the shipping cost and how it changes with qty. I also will try to source multiple items from a single seller as that generally results in lower per unit shipping cost. It's a lot of work, but if you are ordering 10 or more pieces, the savings can be HUGE.

I am an Amazon prime member and returns are easy and free.

I have never returned anything to AliExpress, but I have had my money returned for missing or damaged or 'not as expected'. NONE of them wanted the goods back, too expensive and complicated trans border issues.

Hi Ron @zander,

I agree with much of what you say, albeit (as always 🤨 ) a couple of observations.

When you say 'Third party Goods' , I guess you mean sellers operating through Banggood, rather like Amazon 'marketplace' and everything on ebay .. in which case I think you are right.

They do however sell goods from other companies ...e.g. my Hantek scope came from Banggood's UK warehouse, which saved a UK tax nightmare that arises when the total order exceeds about £150.

--------

I have also only had one 'argumentative' refund with AliExpress... a SDmicro to SD card lead. The 'plug' end is a PCB, was supposed to fit an SDmicro slot, but was badly made, so it didn't fit. It took about 3 rounds on their semi-automated procedure,  to persuade them it was duff, in spite of lots of feedback from others saying the same thing appearing in the period of my ordering and resolving the case. They did the right thing in the end, and it only involved about £4 anyway. I think if a photo had shown it to be bad, life would have been easier, but this was only a minute size/shape error.

A couple of times they have given refunds (again very small value only) for things that hadn't even left China (as shown on the tracker), long after they should have arrived .. they did eventually arrive, and as you say are happy for me to keep them.

Overall, things arrive and work. One or two small parts have defects, but are of no consequence as I buy a few spares.

Best wishes, Dave

Hy, i'm a bite late. But is someone alereday buy a combo motherboard + CPU + ram there ? having  a xeon base machine for 300 cdn is a attrative price ! 😀  Some of those motherboard brand are even sold by newegg.ca for a lot more. Is someone have use a MACHINIST motherboard ? 

Thanks,

S

@solusseeke Ali can be good, but it can also be bad. That price is nearly 10x too high though for Ali. I bought an entire PC with a 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM, BT, WiFi 5 and W11 Pro for $268 CDN

Hy, have to compare apple with apple. This offer seem an Aliexpress + Machinist board deal. I expect that Ali only associate his name with a good offer:

MACHINIST MR9A PRO MAX X99 Motherboard Set LGA 2011-3 Kit Xeon E5 2680 V4 CPU 4X16=64GB DDR4 ECC RAM Memory ( 4 channels ) Nvme M.2 Sata ATX  for 220 cdn

This box give enough room for a developper and the windows workstation flavor. Imagine what you could do with this box with an KDE linux  !

In fact, it rise a question that since 3 years the reseller have raise their margins. And accordingly, chinease industries did the same.

And what you call inflation is in part that most of the part of the chain supplies pull the carpet to increase their margin and send to the end customer the bill. End customer have to reject this increase by not buying.Too many people did do this.

As and exception to this, Invidia can't sold their 4060 video card srap. And even the laughing interview of his CEO, Nvidia start now to reduce it price. 

bye and have a good day !

S