Anyone bought goods from Alibaba.com?

This is the first time I have purchased goods from Alibaba online. The seller is very dishonest and deceive, I was very disappointed. I ordered a carbon monoxide detectors, but received smoke detectors. Following discussions with the seller, the seller asked me to mail back the goods, not only agreed to pay the freight from the U.S. to China, and also agreed for a fully refund. I also got the pre-approval before I mailed back the goods to China, but after I returned the good, the seller ignore my message and reject the refund. I spent total of US $ 193.05(include merchandise, shipping from china to US, shipping from US to China), lots of energy and time. Very bad experience.

Hello! I used to buy goods on alibaba.com, a lot is on the other.
It's like amazon Asia, however, not everything was good on that, I have repeatedly encountered counterfeits. Most fakes come from China.

Hello AffiliateRG,

I went through Alibaba and found Jaks Toys Ltd, unfortunately for me it was a complete scam! I have lost money on it - basically I sent the money (they have a business address in the UK so thought I was safe!) they wouldn't send the goods and they refused a Refund.

I am at present at the start of going through the Small Claims Court!

I have since found another person on a different forum who has experienced exactly the same treatment, so I also have this info to pass on to the court and have also informed the Tradings Standard people.

They have since been taken down from Alibaba but I think we can be sure they are on other Wholesale/Trading Sites and no doubt doing a great trade by scamming people.

Difficult to know who to trust out there - so if anyone else comes across Jaks Toys Ltd Beware - Run the other way!!!!!

Alibaba is similar to Ebay or Amazon, it's a marketplace... They (as a marketplace) are very reliable. The actual sellers that sell on Alibaba - well, some of them are scammers (usually the ones selling items at prices to good to be true). I've been sourcing products from China via Alibaba since 2008, i've met a lot of sellers who were trying to scam us but with a bit of due diligence and a bit of common sense we managed to avoid being scammed. If you're not sure about the seller, PM me and i can look into it. And also, earlier this year alibaba introduced an escrow service. You pay 5-7% extra but the seller actually gets the money only after you confirm that you received your order. And this escrow feature actually works - we had to use it once: we purchased 10 smartphones from a seller we had no previous relation with and we got the 10 smartphones alright, but instead of being quad-cores like we ordered, we got dual-cores (everything else was the same, same screen, same memory, etc, just a different cpu); the difference between a dual core and a quad was like $50 (so it was a $500 total loss for us); we contacted the seller, they said they didn't know about this and that they sent the phones we ordered; they then said we should return the 10 phones and they will "check" them and replace them if that's the case - but we would have to pay for all the shipping (to and from China - and that's a bit expensive); so we contacted the Alibaba escrow service, they asked some details from us, we sent them some IMEI codes and also had videocall and showed them the phones and the fact that they were dual cores and not quads as we ordered, and one week later, they refunded us the $500 difference, despite the opposition of the seller.
So Alibaba works smooth, but be careful, there are lots of other issues with sourcing products from China.

I order from Alibaba vendors all of the time. Never any major issues as long as you have realistic expectations and know that quality of items can vary drastically between different vendors.

Hi guys. Am I correct in thinking that only some sellers on Alibaba.com offer the Escrow payment route?