A couple of earlier posts here reveal my past dealings with Aliexpress and the slightly tempestuous relationship that developed as a result. Summarising, while Ebay and Amazon have basically 'got it covered' with regards to about 90% of the stuff that I order online, there's always that other 10% that must be catered for by someone else - enter Aliexpress. While that might suggest that Aliexpress (and its parent-company, Alibaba) are marginal players in the online shopping arena, the truth is probably the opposite - generally they have for sale, everything the other two offer, only MORE - there is a reason that China has become the economic powerhouse that it is!
So occasionally, when the need arises, I place an order or two with Aliexpress. Whereas, I've never been screwed financially by Amazon or Ebay, the same cannot be said for Aliexpress. In the past, I've had an Aliexpress Seller renege on an order I'd placed with them. Another, refused to cancel an order that had been in limbo for almost 2 weeks, instead putting the order through immediately after I had issued a Cancellation Request - the 'Request' is capitalised for a reason, you cannot cancel an order that has been placed on Aliexpress, like you can with Amazon, you may only meekly 'request' the Seller to cancel & refund your money. What experience has shown is that many Aliexpress Sellers lack the 'professionalism' seen on both Ebay and Amazon. This is more down to their fear of repercussions, or lack thereof, from the platforms on which they operate. Putting it bluntly, Ebay puts the fear of God into Sellers and will suspend their accounts once they fall below a certain 'Customer Satisfaction' level, whereas Aliexpress doesn't appear to give a shit about how its Sellers treat their customers. Sure, Aliexpress pays lip-service to stuff like 90-day money back guarantees, but this for the most part is Public Relations stuff - I once had an undelivered order that had been placed 5 months before, and had ZERO ways of contacting Aliexpress to get a refund - the opportunity only came when, after God knows how long, they finally put their Customer Forum back on-line. So, notions like "the Customer is always right" would be a source of amusement, not contemplation, to Aliexpress management.
Segway-ing to a point, what has me venting of late is the state of the Aliexpress platform itself. Frankly, it's becoming unusable. First off, there's the 'semi-insistence' that you must login to your Aliexpress account, even when just doing a search. I've tried various workarounds to avoid this, including deleting all Aliexpress cookies, to no avail. Add to this, for whatever reason, Aliexpress has found it necessary to lace its platform with 'anti-bot' verification measures, where before proceeding with even a search, it is often necessary for prospective customers to 'swipe' a bar from left-to-right. This would be bearable if the bloody thing worked - half the time, this is what I see;
This 'swipe-left' thing doesn't appear to effect the Russian Aliexpress site, which in desperation often finds me trying to negotiate the site using the Cyrillic alphabet. Another attempted 'work-around' has included creating a dummy Aliexpress account. This worked for searches, at least initially. It appears that after a certain number of cookies have been created, or after a certain amount of time since their creation, the infernal 'swipe-left' thing comes back with a vengeance. But what really grinds my gears, is when the 'swipe-left' thing works and I get a "Verified" green tick-mark, only to see the following when it tries to proceed;
Witnessing this nonsense day in, day out, had me wondering if maybe it was the Firefox browser that was somehow incompatible with the Aliexpress platform, so I decided to test the theory by installing a fresh copy of Google's Chrome on a Win7 box - just to rule out the Linux OS as well. Result? - same thing happens!!! In fact, the 'experience' is even worse with Chrome - here, after every search, the user is treated to a pop-up window that must be forcibly closed in order to proceed. This makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER!!!
Summing up, the Aliexpress platform appears to be on its way to becoming an unusable POS. It beggars belief that something that is essentially a license to print money, has undergone such woeful development. As a long-time Aliexpress customer, I can at least attest to the fact that yesteryear, the platform itself was on-par with Amazon and Ebay. Today, as far as usability goes, it's a shadow of what it once was, no doubt a result of management's reluctance to employ competent web-developers.
*** WAKE UP ALIEXPRESS, YOUR SITE IS CRUMBLING BENEATH YOU ***
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