AliExpress has this quality of being a surprise gift for your future self. You buy stuff, forget about it, and then one day receives a pleasant surprise. This only works with cheap stuff you don't mind a lot, if it's too expensive you risk just being anxious for a long time.
Reminds me of the time I ordered a $5 nano drone from AliExpress, and after 2 months Indian customs sent me a very threatening ‘show cause’ notice demanding I pay $50 as a fine and appear before the customs officer or whoever to explain why I should not be prosecuted for the illegal importation of illegal goods (no drone with the letter of course). I opted to ignore the matter<p>I remembered growing up with a the children of a customs officer. Every now and then he would show up with boxes of confiscated pirated movie / game days discs, asking us to pick what we wanted before he was going to return the rest of lot to presumably be ‘destroyed’.<p>So I’m reasonably sure some some customs officer’s kid ended up enjoying the $5 drone I ordered. The circle of life I guess?
Reminds me of the time that my mom ordered shoes off of some random FB ad. Her credit card was charged and we waited a few weeks. Tried to go back to the site to see what the order status was and the site didn't exist anymore! We assumed that she just got scammed and did a chargeback to get a refund. A YEAR later the shoes randomly show up in the mail -- original website has long since vanished off the face of the internet.
Its extreme, but having seen a lot of pictures from Chinese package shipping warehouses its not that surprising. Guess it was stuck under a conveyor belt or something.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=chinese%20package%20sorting&tbs=imgo:1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=chinese%20package%2...</a>
I used buy smaller items like keychains from AliExpeess. Then twice I bought pricey stuff costing more than $50 each expecting a better quality product. Boy was I wrong! All that changed was the packaging. It wasn’t dirty anymore. But the items were still extremely poor in quality. Reminded me of the book “Poorly made in China”
I ordered something from deal extreme once, it was a headphone jack button you could map to a custom action in android. This was like 2012. Never showed up so I got a refund. Over a year later it somehow showed up.<p>Meanwhile every single one of my Aliexpress orders have showed up and exceeded expectations, shipping time be damned.
I once sent a postcard to my mom in Puerto Rico from the Gili Islands in Indonesia. The outdoor mailbox at an old post office was overflowing with mail — I just left my postcard on the pile of mail hoping for the best but not expecting much. Lo and behold my mom received the postcard 2 years later.
The longest delivery I ever endured makes for a funny anecdote now, too.<p>2020. Lockdowns. Everybody needs Internet. My neighbor was a nice lady who didn't have much tech knowledge. She was borrowing WiFi from a guy upstairs. Her computer was a hand-me-down from a former neighbor too. It was an HP all-in-one and the WiFi controller burned out. So she made it my mission to restore her connectivity.<p>I knew we'd need a dongle, and so I shopped for them on Amazon and Newegg while she looked on. For some dumb, stupid, unfathomable reason, I decided that the best choice was for about $12, direct from China. We plunked down our money and placed our order, and began to wait.<p>I communicated the situation to my online friends, and there's a guy who always sends me his secondhand, usable electronics. He had a dongle handy and so he mailed it to me.<p>It was like September 2020. The Chinese dongle from Amazon stalled out. I think it had shipped from the vendor and it was just sitting on a ship in port somewhere, for ages. It didn't budge for weeks, months.<p>The other dongle arrived from my friend in Utah and I installed it, and my neighbor was happy again. But we still hadn't received our treat from China.<p>And then one day it dislodged itself, the ship made it across the Pacific, and the thing finally landed in my mailbox. So I installed that dongle too, and my neighbor had dual-channel WiFi. Total overkill, totally unnecessary, but why not, eh? Thanks, COVID-19!
Oh, so is this is a seller that processed the transaction after four years? Or did customs have a big box of AliExpress stuff in storage for four years that they only released when the platform was unbanned.<p>Related, I had a medium size Ali package stuck in transit for eight months at one point. I’d like to know what even happened to make it take that long. Was it stuck on a loading dock? In customs? Lost in the corner of a warehouse?
Are there good tips for Ali Express that elude normal people like me?<p>I once tried to order a few blank clothing items, real basic stuff, and it was an utterly bewildering array of options so I picked a DFW things and what showed up was just the poorest imaginable quality.<p>I feel like I’m missing something.
I ordered so many hobby electronics parts From AliExpress before India banned it. I learnt so much for my career from these. I hate that I owe large parts of my career not to my country, because I'm self taught, but to my own resourcefulness. Once AliExpress was gone, so was my interest in hobby electronics and DIY Mechanical Keyboards. We don't get most of these things here in India, and our government wants to develop industries here without nurturing the DIY engineer who will one day provide jobs by making a company from his passion.
A lady here in South Africa received a parcel just the other day from the US that her father mailed 13 years ago.<p>It would be pretty interesting to see the full tracking history for that parcel.
I wonder why @dang would consider an article such as this postworthy without any doubt, whereas he had to be convinced to allow an article about a literal armed rebellion against a nuclear power...