AliExpress - 'is it safe ?'
Unfocussed Mike said, 1715350789
Chris Ennis said
Paraphrasing the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, yes Aliexpress is safe it's us that are in trouble.
I made a purchase in February which never arrived. Aliexpress initially would not entertain a refund, then neither would PayPal because some delivery had been made to some address. But it was to an address some 170 miles away.
Various appeals were fruitless until I escalated the case to the Financial Ombudsman Service with the details. Suddenly, the decisions have been reversed and I think I am in the process of getting my money back. I understand that these cases are also reported to the FCA who regulate if and how PayPal can operate in the UK.
My takeaways: I don't trust Alexpress nor PayPal. I find their "guarantees" to be worthless.
Chris
My bad experience with AliExpress was Paypal-related -- a handful of orders that were automatically closed without any information (one order doubled, because it said to retry, and one alternative order I placed when those had apparently failed) but AliExpress still took the money via PayPal a short while later.
These automatically "closed" orders don't appear in your AliExpress order history(!!!) so there was no way to even begin to report them on the AliExpress side.
I spoke to PayPal. It took a bit of time to get through to a support person. There wasn't much information I could give them I was not at all optimistic, but they were super helpful actually, and the transactions were reversed within a day.
Really small amounts of money -- about 15 quid in total I think -- but unnerving.
I would absolutely not now use PayPal to deal with AliExpress. Not enough vendors support it, AliExpress don't support it systemwide, and there does not appear to be enough information exposed to PayPal for them to easily help when things go wrong. And things have gone wrong. But I don't believe it was their fault in this situation.
The way the AliExpress account screens do not provide any details of "closed" transactions for which money had been taken does not fill me with confidence at all.
As a result, lately I have preferred to track down the same items via eBay, which is usually possible.
Edited by Unfocussed Mike