Ali Express etc and Xaiomi Advice please

sillygoose

Missed this when posted but would agree strongly with dj1471's comment.

I buy a lot of stuff through Aliexpress, often several items a week. I have had problems but I have never lost a dispute and not got my money back when needed.

I did once buy a Xiaomi MI3 from a high feedback seller, it arrived quickly fully boxed and checked out as original (there are a lot of fake Xiaomi out there)

But it had a fault in that the soft keys didn't illuminate making it near impossible to use. Once proved to the seller by uploading them a video of it a refund was offered fine.

Here is the problem, you HAVE to send it back tracked to be safe and the cheapest I could find was ipost for about £32 (on a £115 purchase).

As soon as the tracking showed 'delivered' Aliexpress refunded. But of course you don't get return postage back. The Chinese state massively subsidise shipping out of China but your stuck with our rates to get it back.

So no, no more high value purchases for me. On most low value items Aliexpress will rule on your side of with a full refund with no need to return the item as long as you upload decent evidence.

angryparcel

DavidP24 wrote: »

Maybe one day China will decide reputation DOES matter

look out your window and see the pigs fly.

trouble is a lot of services within china are run by the corrupt Chinese state government
Shipping
Mail
Media
Internet Service
All state run

the worse is Internet service Chinanet.
This is the main source of worldwide spam which services like spamcop no longer pass spam reports onto chinanet as they are ignored.

Stoke

What a joke this thread is. I've bought hundreds of items from China, including two mobile phones. You take a chance. Both phones are still working fine. The one time I had a high value item go tits up, I put a chargeback in, they didn't dispute it. I kept the faulty goods and got my money back.

If you like Xiaomi, go ahead and buy one. They're cracking little devices and my gf will tell you that as she owns a Redmi 2.

GunJack

DavidP24 wrote: »

I think the Government should apply a simple £1 tax on every item from China, there is a lot of tax fraud where items are declared under value, this would regain lost revenue.

Get real, that £1 would turn into more like £7-8 with the RM "handling charge" to collect it on top....

I buy all my vaping kit direct from China (where 99.99% of all vape kit is manufactured) - you take the trade-off of cost v customer service and understand that before you buy...having said that, some of the bigger companies are much better at it these days.

If buying from anywhere abroad, it's a pain if you have to return stuff.