Kingzone N5 mobile phone
If you don’t already know what Aliexpress is, it’s sort of the Ebay of china. It’s parent company Alibaba is a business to business wholesaler, and Aliexpress is the branch of the company that handles business to customer transactions.
Aliexpress has a large number of individual companies that offer products to consumers. For common items, usually several companies will offer competing prices, and customer reviews are supposed to keep the individual sellers honest. Aliexpress themselves have an escrow service, and if your item doesn’t arrive, in theory you can make a claim and get your money back.
In theory it’s all a good idea, and in fact I’ve bought some 50+ items over the last 2 years or so, ranging in price from a few cents to a few hundred euros, and not had any serious problems until now. Until now, I haven’t had any problems with individual sellers, and have only just uncovered how bad the escalation process is for complaints.
Basically, I bought this phone for 2 reasons. It supports 4G mobile frequencies used in my area, and necessary for reception in my house. It also has 5Ghz (802.11ac) WiFi, which is what I use at home. Otherwise I was looking for the cheapest phone. It was also a small bonus that this phone had the latest Android 5.1 and a dual sim I bought it from this seller at Aliexpress: D&S Electronic Mall. This seller has a very bad attitude, and does not stand behind what they sell.
It turns out the 5Ghz WiFi, 802.11ac, does not work on this phone. The description of the phone was just wrong. On the manufacturers website, it does not mention this as a feature. According to the seller mentioned above, they were told by the manufacturer it does support 5Ghz WiFi, so it must. Perhaps it’s necessary to fix it with a future software upgrade…! Therefore there’s nothing more for the seller to do, and it’s my problem. The seller pointed out all the other sellers selling the same phone say the same thing, so how could everyone be wrong?
Just for the record, I noticed dx.com was selling the same phone with the same mistake in their description. I notified them of the mistake and they updated their website.
Final Settlement (not yet appealed)
After a very long dispute process, including making a video ‘proving’ the fault with the phone, they finally offered me a refund of about $20. They also offered that I could return the phone at my own cost for a full refund, but the shipping costs are too expensive for this. I’ve appealed this, so it might change, but the whole process has completely warn me out and turned me off of Aliexpress.
Words cannot describe how dissatisfied I am. This was their mistake. They advertised the wrong features of this phone. If they got the wrong information from the manufacturer, that’s up to them to sort out. In a case like this, when it’s the sellers fault, there are generally three things to do:
- Fix the phone
- Pay the costs of returning the phone and give a full refund
- Send a new phone that works according to the description
A small refund like $20 is an insult.
The entire reason for dealing with the business to costumer branch of Alibaba is so they will fix problems like this when they occur.
Other Stories
In the Netherlands there are quite a few unhappy people with Aliexpress. I was reading for example about one woman who ordered a pair of shoes. When the package arrived it contained two left shoes. She agreed with the seller she would send it back at her own expense for a refund, which cost her about €25. After several months went by without anything happening, she started to enquire about her refund. Then she got a notice from the post office a package was waiting for her, and it turned out the seller in China refused to accept the package so it was returned to her.
This is another reason for not trying to return something at your own expense.
Other Complaints About Aliexpress
They are in the process of completely eliminating the possibility to directly contact a customer support representative. Instead you have to go via a robot, that tries to answer your questions, and in the end if it decides to connect you to a real person it only does this during working hours in China and only with a web chat session.
I personally won’t do business with a company where direct contact with a customer support representative is not possible, offline, 24 hours per day via eamil or a web form.
Their website is very buggy. Uploading videos doesn’t always work. Some things, like their entire dispute process, are very confusing and it’s very easy to mistakenly press a fatal button, from which there is no recovery. For example, with every dispute, there are two options: ‘agree with seller’ or ‘cancel dispute’. These have very different consequences, depending on which one you press.
The review of the sellers are not well presented, and tend to make all sellers look honest. They also expire the information after about 6 months, and after a month you can’t change your review anymore in case you discover more about the product you bought. After a time they also only have the star rating, and the text of the reviews is removed. Aliexpress should make the review information open source, and let interested parties do their own analysis and presentation of the information.
Conclusions
It doesn’t seem to me there is any real consumer protection at Aliexpress, except perhaps if you never receive the item and can prove that.
I contacted my credit card company, and asked if they would reverse the payment for this. They said no. I plan to use another credit card from now on, because most offer this protection.
If you buy anything from Aliexpress, I suggest you make sure you can ask your credit card company to reverse the transaction in case something goes wrong. Otherwise, you’ll really have no recourse.
