> "Six letter Chinese sellers" does not automatically mean cheap shitty defective rejects. If anything, that's just stereotyping and xenophobia.
I've seen people complain that the vendor contact info is obfuscated and untraceable when it's obviously the business owner's personal home address. People will say anything about Chinese vendors.
>Most of the articles you see complain about "resellers," which is a catch-all term that can be basically code for "this person follows the rules, but is Chinese."
Are they actually reselling, though? There's a big gap between dog whistle racism and legitimately not wanting people to sell things they didn't make. The current rules of the site are a separate matter.
Funny thing is, these two stereotypes tend to be less and less representative in my opinion.
Mom and pop store perhaps care less about what they sell on the internet ? Amazon was blocked in France during shelter in place and we had to go through other vendors. We got a surprising amount of mislabelled, slightly unfit (ex: wrong size, wrong color) or completely different stuff sent from small european vendors.
In comparison AliExpress is relatively accurate on descriptions, if color is random you know it at purchase, packaging was piss poor but we always got exactly what we ordered, and we had one issue for 40+ orders.
I would have better faith in a chinese vendor to send me the right USB cable than a Mom and Pop store to send the right size and color of pillow cases.
>A good middle man ensures that you get what was advertised...for example, the chipset is what the product listing says it is. They also provide better documentation, support, the ability to return the item without high shipping costs, etc, than the direct-from-china seller.
On eBay, from a customer's perspective, there's no difference between a US seller and a Chinese one. We have the same way of "punishing" them. I cannot punish a US based seller any more than a Chinese one.
>If these tradeoffs were known before hand, I get your point. Typically, though, they are deliberately not disclosed.
Frankly, the stuff I've bought on eBay from Chinese sellers is so cheap that I don't really care to return them. They fall into the price range of "I don't give a damn". In the US an item may be $30. From the Chinese, $7. It's worth the gamble.
(And it really is worth the gamble. I've not been disappointed once).
Most of the problematic products as they relate to reviews on Amazon are Chinese products. When I used to do incentivized reviews, all but one single company who approached me for a product review (this does not include eBook authors) was not Chinese.
>> For a certain class of goods and for reasonable price points, you do get what you pay for.
This is 100% true, but I find a lot of Chinese products punched above their weight. During my time reviewing, I turned down the cheap sketchy products and focused mainly on stuff that I wanted that looked like they were well made. And you know what, a lot of the products I got were actually fantastic relative to their selling price.
> What we can guarantee is that if you are dealing with someone on our platform, they have never misbehaved before.
It will be interesting to see how you manage that!
A few things I find sorely lacking with Alibaba and China in general, some of which I'm sure you have in your crosshairs, others not so sure:
1. Language - Obviously English isn't their first language so some complications are to be expected, but:
a. I think there has got to be some serious disconnect going on between people with relatively proficient English speaking and writing skills, and companies that need that skill. I've been in contact with some rather large companies ($25+ million in sales or much more) whose sales people are just helpless.
b. Product Descriptions - sometimes just bad spelling/grammar or honest mistakes, but other times they're just plain wrong - like, differentiating details that are really important are ambiguous, or worse. Perhaps this is deliberate to a degree (which I would also like to see go away)
2. Culture - There's stretching the truth, and then there's lying, and it seems where this line is drawn varies greatly between cultures. It's very frustrating when you're trying to source a product, and every person you contact has it, in fact they have everything. Except they don't. Maybe there's something you could do along the lines of a comprehensive catalog of products, so when they list something, they "have" to tie it to a "fairly" strict item number(s), so I don't have to rely on text searches (which go against dishonest product descriptions). And, if they are doing a deal on 2 items and the buyer needs a 3rd, maybe you could somehow offer collaboration capabilities between sellers, ideally ones that they'd actually want to use (share the profit on a sale perhaps?)
3. Product listings - I'm sure you know all the issues here, but the ones that most bother me are the atrociously low-res pictures, pictures from other unrelated products the seller has listed showing when clicking "next", terrible ambiguous/misleading descriptions, etc.
4. Quality control - With modern technology, why some sellers don't do what your platform offers on their own (provide hi-quality photos, etc) is an absolute mystery to me, so it will be nice if you can show them how to do this, and affordably for them so it doesn't cut into their margins. However, for a lot of sellers, the total lack of quality control is a tremendous benefit to them so they can bait & switch, ship different product than ordered, etc.
5. Affordable Escrow service - as others have mentioned, a lot of sellers like to move transactions off the system. I hope you guys can resist the urge to take too much of a cut of the action and find some affordable way to provide security for the buyer and not cut into profits for the seller.
It's good to see some competition for Alibaba that's for sure, I really hope you guys can pull this off. I wish you the best of luck!
"Also, some Chinese sellers will flat-out lie in the specs, so when you're a cheapskate like me, buy from a marketplace that offers hassle-free refunds."
This is the takeaway. Some lie about it knowingly, and some just don't know any better as they are just reselling devices they bought in bulk from the manufacturer who lied about the specs.
This mode of operation is systematic with cheap Chinese products and the sales of such, because every time one of those few alert customers bother themselves with raising the issue, the seller instantly negotiates a discount - now they still made a buck and you still accepted to pay for a faulty product, because it's less hassle than returning it, and shipping it back often costs more than the device itself.
Whenever I pick up some cheap Chinese trinket I understand it will be a gamble.
> - Ordered a brand product and gotten an obvious fake from China. Not good.
> - Ordered a brand product, got something that had obviously been opened and used before.
> - Searched for something, found only hundreds of mostly identical Chinese generic products. Ordered one, was complete and utter garbage.
> - Searched for something, found hundreds of mostly identical Chinese generics. Ordered one, and it was actually pretty decent! Sadly, this happens less often.
Well, that's a daily life experience in China. Globalisation works both ways...
You have to cultivate your intuition. I have no idea how one gets it, but it helps.
I'm shopping on Aliexpress since it opening in 2010, I see that for me Aliexpress is an "easy shopping experience," but for people from my college class shopping there unending frustration. Somehow, they got an almost natural talent getting into trouble with scam deals.
> So I go online to leave a review and warn people off... only to find that the seller "no longer existed". They absolutely did, and were selling their awful snips but had changed their name and paid for a bunch of 5 star reviews again.
I wouldn't be so certain about that. I've found that there are a lot of sellers selling the same things, but they're not the same sellers under different names, they're just getting stuff from the same places. Often, for cheap things, the source is AliExpress (or Alibaba), or potentially cutting out that middleman and just getting them direct from the companies that sell on aliexpress/alibaba.
It's also been my experience that pretty much _anything_ that isn't a big name brand item being sold on Amazon can be found for much much cheaper on Aliexpress. The exact same product, just without the 1000%-2000% markup.
Yeah, having dealt with Chinese vendors and mfgs for years that is a scary scenario. The whole culture of trust / fairness / honesty is very different from the west.
Dealt with our products being knocked off for years, wouldn’t want to buy cancer meds ever!
>While I'm not happy with the supplier, I don't think this was intentional on their part either. They just source AC adapters from someone else in Shenzhen. You can imagine they aren't real familiar with the consequences of trademark infringement. Which is what this was.
So you were their first U.S. customer and they'd never shipped anything to the U.S. before?
> > Actually, I don't know if you did it on purpose, but nihaobaobaomao is a great name... It's very cute and sounds like "Hello bundle kitty"...
> You caught me. :P
> I couldn't bring myself to type something really stereotypically racist.
Hello cat buns!? Of course that's racist; accusing people of eating cats....
:)
(Yeah, that's how I read bao at first...)
More seriously, consider Fenix or Anker; they have "short professional" names, but are not particularly western (esp. the spelling). Both are newer companies, based in China, sell fairly heavily on Amazon, and are frankly some of the best providers of their product niches.
>Nothing in that article makes me more worried about a Chinese company being potentially compromised
Unfortunately my anecdotal experience biases me to believe it. After getting hundreds of Microsoft product keys from Dell, and having 20 to 50÷ of them from China being compromised even with the security scratch off intact. Have not ran into an issue with a single us printed one. Ya, no faith here.
This is the second time I've seen someone complain about "obviously" illegitimate business information that appears to be the vendor's own home address. I don't see how they could be more open or informative than that. Want to get in touch with them? Send a letter to that address; they'll see it.
That article was a bit of a bait-and-switch: instead of explaining why the Chinese resellers all use similar patterns, the author just spent 30 twitter posts complaining about being undercut by cheap Chinese crap
> You'll get from China factories what you order, and then verify the quality of, from Chinese factories.
Agreed. I mentioned that in my last point about IP, which you conveniently ignored.
Apple is an outlier. For every such company, there are thousands of others abroad and local to China that are making absolute trash that only serves to scam consumers and/or end up in landfills shortly after purchase.
I can't count how many Chinese-made things I've bought that ended up in the trash a few days/weeks/months after purchase. I also own a lot of poorly made Chinese electronics that have survived for years, so technically they pass QA, but are cheap feeling and annoying to use despite being expensive. Lenovo laptops come to mind.
Have you seen how rampant this is on Amazon, Wish.com, et al, let alone on Chinese owned retailers? There are entire product categories where you can't avoid buying a shoddy product simply because no alternative exists. I spend hours scouring Amazon to find brand names and sellers I can trust in an attempt to avoid this, dodging page after page of knockoff garbage. It's absolutely exhausting, and often impossible to avoid. A lot of people have given up entirely on purchasing from Amazon, but the convenience is a big factor for me.
So, yes, there are some products made in China with strict quality control that are worthwhile owning. But most are just quick waste making some shady CEOs rich. In either case, they'll most likely be copied and eventually made as cheaply as possible.[1][2]
I've seen people complain that the vendor contact info is obfuscated and untraceable when it's obviously the business owner's personal home address. People will say anything about Chinese vendors.
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