Last Updated on December 14, 2020
AliExpress has unbeatably been one of the cheapest multi vendor online stores. The cheapest nature of AliExpress is as a result of its vendor dominance in China, Malaysia and Singapore.
The major challenge is how one can safely buy on AliExpress out of many thousands of listed products.
It is not always about the way the westerners and other part of the continents have engineered their thoughts that Chinese products cheap and fake.
China has lots of resources to put into finished products and what they manufacture is always from the choice of the suppliers contract with them.
They have a good quality control over general manufactured products.
We have earlier published an article on various methods to track AliExpress orders. In this post, we have shared the best practices to safely buy on AliExpress with the right items.
This article is not exclusively on AliExpress. We used AliExpress as our reference point of study. You can use these practices on your favorite online stores like Ebay, AliExpress etc.
Four healthy practices to safely buy from AliExpress
- Reviews
- Asked Questions
- Seller’s information and age of existence on AliExpress
- Feedback and Response time on customers
1. Reviews – Pay more attention on lower ratings
Reviews is one of the most important aspect about customer’s satisfactions, dissatisfaction, feelings on what they bought.
Reviews influences the ratings of the products when searched, the negativity and positivity on both sellers and products.
It is a natural thing to go for a product listing with lots of positive 5 stars or an average 4.5 ratings than those with less than 3.0 ratings.
But, you don’t just focus on the good expressions of the buyers usually at 5 ratings.
Sellers can solicit for reviews either from their team, family and friends or any other ways things work. A lower rating has always been seen as the true experience of customers.
Although, there a lot of complaints from customers that has nothing to do with the delivery of their items.
Your concern on ratings (1, 2 and 3 stars) should be focused on the quality of item when received, seller feedback to complaints, different item received(not what was shown on the store) and delivery time.
Any other complains like damaged items may not be entirely necessary considering the delivery company.
2. Asked Questions
There’s an additional feedback from customers and also an inquiry section where store viewers ask questions about the product listed. These questions are answered by customers that bought the same item.
From their responses, one can decide whether to buy or move away.
3. Seller’s information and age of existence
For AliExpress, it shows their seller’s information including their location, age. The age simply shows how old they have been operating on AliExpress.
Age is a good pointer when dealing with stores that promises to sell an item whose price is far too cheap than what has been listed on other vendor’s catalogs.
The more older a store is, the more accountable and credible it is. It is an advantage to safely buy from AliExpress and any other online stores.
4. Feedback and Response time on customers
Feedback is an average ratings from AliExpress from the summation of item as described, communication and shipping speed.
This seller ratings are collective customer feedback after an item has been marked as received by the customer.
If it takes a seller 2 days to respond to customers, then there’s a chance that customer support is low. A responsive customer support should be less than 6 hours. An average response time is 12 hours which is not too bad.
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We would have added number of sales but it does not truly identify customer experience. An item sells more is determinate on the marketing funnels, its category of daily usages and more.
Conclusion:
Now that we have shared the steps to safely buy from AliExpress, you can now pick options that are more sensible to your situation.
