buying electronics, aliexpress, alibaba

[SentinelAeon]

I have been ordering electronics on aliexpress for years now. Its cheap and often works. But aliexpress makes it really hard to find items at the set price. Free shipping and set by lowest price is often broken. I basicaly have to spend 2 hours to find what i need at price i am ready to pay.

I will give you an example. I need 10 certain laptop power suplies. I set the price, i set free shipping. I refresh 5 times (first 4 it says no hits). Then i click and see that the price actualy wasn't for power suply but only for 3 pin AC cable. Then finaly find a hit that looks legit. But now the shipping is 10€ and not free shipping. I increase items from 1 to 4 and suddenly i see free shipping but now each item has like 50% higher price.

Alibaba is even worse. I see item at certain price, minimum order 10x. I write them and get back the price of about 200% higher then their range written in ad.

I dont understand it because i am ready to order and if i spend 1 hour browsing nonsense ads, then i simply will run out of time and will not order. But if i could just type in the price and get relevants hits, i would spend 1 hour ordering different items. So they are losing money and i am losing time.

Did anyone find a way around this ? Maybe some 3rd party site that is accesing aliexpress and sorting the nonsense for me ? Or maybe some site where i can just write ok, i want 10x standard HP 19V 4.74A 7.4mm power suply for 80 or 90€, write me back if u can supply that ?

 

[Tony Stewart]

it took me 20 seconds to find a compatible supply for <$20 Cdn for 1 pc. I guess you need more experience.

 

[SentinelAeon]

About as low as they go is 8€ shipping included. I bought about 100 for that price so far. But it takes time because like i said, shenanigans. If it allowed me to set price + shipping at 8€ and show me results, it would take 5 seconds. And if there were no results, sure, you set it at 9€, 10€ and so on. What i am trying to say is that if you have a price in your head, its gonna take a very long time to find item at that price. It shouldn't be this way. Its been a long time since i used ebay but back then i remember it had an option to sort items by lowest price+shipping and back then there were no strange things like picture of a power supply but listing a price for cable only. Sadly ebay is quite a lot more expensive than aliexpress for the same chinese item.

But yes, if you dont care about price then its fast, probably the first hit. But for 20$ i can buy original power suply, in my country. One usualy uses aliexpress to get a significant discount.

 

[For The Popcorn]

Good luck trying to get AliExpress to change its marketing practices and often deceptive practices.