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.
So you did not have any problem for 2 years, saved a lot of money and now one bad experience makes you blacklist the site?
Hi Sophia,
I’m just reporting my experiences. This one bad experience made clear Ali-Express doesn’t have any credible customer service. I doubt I’ll be buying anything from them again. You and others are free to make your own choice. I certainly suggest making sure you can reverse transactions on your credit card, otherwise you really won’t have any recourse if something goes wrong.
So far I have had a good experience with dx.com, and I hope another company will replace ali-express and fix the problems. I think now and in the future there will be other companies to choose from.
Alieexpress is a china communist company. Their motive earn money and no concern for customers.Even you have evidence, Aliexpress still will reject your complaints because refunds make them lost the commissions.
Aliexpress online customer is a marketing gimmick to look like supporting customers but reality they cannot and will not do anything after you logoff the conversations. They also types of people who lies to customers and will not do as they had promised to do. Their main job is entertain customers and makes it look like there are customer service but reality is no service. They will not reply any email and forced customer to go online chat with those useless customer service.
Aliexpress is the same as those China companies who sent damaged machineries, equipments or devices to customers and then ignore them. So many companies and people had been cheated by China companies and online especially Aliexpress.
Aliexpress charges lower commission to sellers and do not care how bad is the seller. The main requirement, earn commission through sellers. If the price is higher, the risk of being cheated is higher and Aliexpress also will reject anything complaints and refunds. If you go through all the surveys, Aliexpress had the worse customer services. No reply emails, video evidence upload always stuck halfway, twisted customer guarantee at refund, forcing customers to bear the consequences. All the worse if you complaint more, Aliexpress will just delete your account and forced you pay for all the future received goods that you have ordered. In other words no more refund for future receipt goods. The online software stops you from submitting refund complaint.
Hi James/John:
Thanks for the comment!. What you say is exactly the experience I had.
I started an account with aliX, and I have 8 items in my cart, but agreed reading this, I’ve decided to not go through with the purchase. Knowing that their customer service is not up to par is very unsettling. I think I’ll stick to amazon. Thank you for sharing your experience with everyone. It’s very much appreciated.
I can only confirm the above – Aliexpress doesn’t have a customer service… Only one good advice – avoid buying there – it seem cheap and well managed but quality is often very poor and dispute handling is crappy….
I have to say I’ve never had this issue. I’ve always received items and if not a refund. Until now. It’s a daft little thing but I order a couple of cuticle oil pens which never turned up. When I tried to open a dispute it showed that the items were delivered and the transaction had automatically finalized leaving me unable to open a dispute!!the seller said it had been returned to them (so that’s why it was showing as delivered) and ldoesnt ‘seem’ to understand that I am now unable to open the dispute just keeps telling me to. I can’t find anyone to contact on the app. I’m going to attempt loggin in in a browser to see if hats any better but it’s pretty annoying.
Dont buy Aliexpress seler
Shenzhen Zerospace Technology Ltd.
The packet not sended and not refound the money
I have recently ordered several items from china companies. I am home renovator and found they had what looked like nice faucets, sinks, and such. I ordered 5 items from Light in the Box. 4 items arrived within 7-10 days, the 5th item took longer- maybe three weeks. All items have very good packaging and were exactly as described, and very nice. I would recommend Light in the box to anyone.
After receiving the items from LITB I decided to try Aliexpress. I had heard what a great business man this Alibaba owner is so I figured if LITB was good (a company I had not heard of before) than Aliexpress is probably even better right? So I ordered a $400 sink. The sink took awhile, understandable. When I received my package I opened it and was very happy, it looked just as expected, until I noticed it had two significant dents in the bottom. I assumed it was from shipping, and the box itself was pretty banged up. I emailed the seller with a close up photo of the damage. At first they denied it was not their sink and implied that I was trying to con them. So I sent additional photos clearly showing it was a sink from their company. The resolution they offered was to give me $20, and told me to just bang out the dents! Really??!! Supposedly if we cannot find a resolution then Aliexpress will step in and give a refund. I am waiting to see how this is going to pan out before I order anything else.
Bought a Left Hand guitar through Shop3192083 Store on Aliexpress. They emailed me to say it had been posted. The EMS tracking number did not work – so I kept asking them if it had been sent and they replied Yes. Still no tracking – They extended buyer protection twice After 45 days I started the dispute – Ah! magically they had the guitar and would send it to me – so they lied about sending it earlier. Kept sending me emails to drop dispute saying that the guitar was a “custom guitar”. Then they came up with a dispute resolution and I quote ” This is the left hand guitar, is the custom guitar, we have done, the customer not!!” . I rejected their solution as this is not a custom order – its what they advertised !!!! Here is their advertisement top line !!
Factory + Left hand acoustic chbson j200
Dispute is still in progress ????????
Recently Aliexpress released a new version of their payment process. It requires third party cookie access for alipay.com. More and more Web sites require third party cookie access. I hate this. Why should alipay.com be allowed to read everything noted in cookies from any other Web site I ever browsed to? But even worse, only Chrome users can open third party cookies only for a specific site and most Chrome users do not know how to open it selectively. As a result we are pressed to open third party cookie access generally, so that every site can read what any other site left behind as cookie information.
More than that, Aliexpress does not test the third party cookie setting of the browser and does warn the user about the issue. Instead what is happening in the payment process is totally confusing and misleading. When you try paying the items in the basket, after the shipping address and items validation page in Chrome and in Firefox you receive “You haven’t signed in, or your previous session has expired” even if you just freshly signed in. In Internet Explorer it displays some weird mixture of English and your local language and says “Payment failed”, “System error”, “The system is busy. Please try again”. In all browsers the basket is now empty. That made me believe the shop system forgot my orders. So I searched the items again, placed them in the basket again and tried paying again. No change. I tried the same with logging in only in the very end, the same with deleted cache and cookies, same with other browsers, and the same the other day.
I tried a support chat – the agent had no clue, only knew there was a recent major system change and I was not the only one with that symptom. “The management team is still working on that.” The support chat took a strange end: “Please do not be worried, the management team is now engaged with this issue and now looking for a way to sort this problem”. “OK, thank you, buy”. “Wait. Please be advised that this would only take 3-5 business days to process. However, you don’t have to worry, that is just the maximum processing time frame.” “You want me to sit here and wait 3-5 business days?” “Yes please. That’s what the other member asked to dear customer.”
Some googling revealed the third party cookie dependency of the Ali cloud and alipay.com was part of the list requiring third party cookie access. So I tried enabling it for alipay.com and could now pay. At the end of this checkout the system told me that I have 63 more orders awaiting payment. Whether I want to pay those now. For each item, I paid the first occurrence in the order list, sent the seller a note explaining why I need to cancel the other occurrences and cancelled them one by one. Before I entered this clicking marathon, I tried another support chat asking whether they can delete all unpaid orders in my order chain. They could not.
Hi Peter,
I’ve also noticed a lot of dodgy things about their website. If I go there on my phone, Android asks my permission to let them use my camera. What do they need to take of picture of me for? I guess everything we’ve ever heard of concerning Chinese hacking on the Internet takes place on the aliexpress website.
So far I’ve ordered knockoffs and all from aliexpress and nothing went wrong. I have opened disputes sometimes and most of the time I had no problems, I just got a full refund. Until once, I got a Pandora essence charm that wouldn’t go onto the bracelet and the seller pressured me to keep trying. Needless to say, the bracelet broke so I opened a dispute. The claim got rejected the first time because they needed a video of the charm not going onto the bracelet (what nonsense, but I did it) and after some bickering, I got my money back. This, however, is the first time that I had to appeal a dispute. I bought DR. Martens. The size table said I should order my regular size, so I did (I know my feet by now). When I got them and tried them on, however, my toes were touching the front in an annoying way, which never happens with the originals, the originals are slightly big. I got refused the first time, compared with the real ones the second time and then sent the evidence as they wanted. After annoying convos with the customer service (as I was done waiting for my 50 euros), the update stated refund 0,00. I was like, excuse me? You send me shoes I cannot wear and suspend the seller but refuse to give me anything? I don’t think so… I appealed for the first time. If I don’t get my money back I will be pissed and not buy clothes or shoes again. However, Pandora is a lot cheaper on there and where I order the quality is 1:1, so I will only buy that then. I hope the case team finds their mind back and returns my money. I will not just give up on my money, no way.