AliExpress: Ordering from the USA or Canada
You might have gotten the impression that AliExpress does not ship to the USA or Canada, since its not quite popular in North America yet. However, this is not true. AliExpress is one of the biggest eCommerce platforms in the world, and their expansion has increased to countries such as the United States of America and Canada. More info about how big AliExpress is here.
"Alibaba (parent company of AliExpress) is as big as eBay and Amazon combined"
Below we will go over some of the topics that you need to know when you are ordering from AliExpress and live in the USA or Canada.
Payment
You might be familiar with PayPal, well AliExpress has a similar payment system called AliPay. It’s an identical copy of PayPal and does also offer buyer and seller protections, similar to Paypal. We recently published a whole article about the protection types and the return process here.
Shipping
I don’t want to disappoint, but please do not expect overnight shipping or 3-day delivery from AliExpress to USA or Canada. AliExpress ships all of their product from China. That said, in some cases it can take up 3-4 weeks to get your item when shipping via regular China Mail.
TIP: Select ePacket as a shipping service, which cost on average $2-3 more but the delivery time can be drastically reduced to 7-21 days.
Cost
What it cost $2 incl. shipping to the USA? It must be a scam? Well in most cases it isn’t. AliExpress can offer incredible discounts, since you are buying directly from the manufacturer and not from a “middle man” aka store. This will guarantee much cheaper prices than any other place.
For instance, an iPhone 7 Unicorn case cost $1.68 incl. shipping to the USA. Crazy huh? Well thats how cheap many of the things are on AliExpress. In case you fell in love with the case, you can find it here ;)
Quality
Well, that’s a big one. Quality on AliExpress can vary a lot. If you are ordering a pair of sneakers for $6 incl. shipping to North America, please don’t be disappointed when the quality is on par. That said, there are some tricks to identify quality products.
- Check out Peeksy, here you will find user uploaded photos of their last AliExpress product. By looking at the pictures you might get an idea of the quality.
- User reviews can tell you how the material may feel, something that you can not get out of a photo.
We strongly recommend to check the quality before you buy from AliExpress. I’m sure you don’t want to end up on our next “Shopping Fail” post here.
Customs
Our team ordered over 250+ items over the past 2 years from AliExpress and non of the orders ended up at customs. That said, this is not guarantee but quite unlikely.
Lastly, please feel free to post below with any comments or ideas. We are always happy to share new learnings and make new friends.
