Aliexpress' bugged interface: "Unpaid" items duplicate when paid

[Whales]

I realised today, whilst going through my banking, that I have unintentionally bought $45 of duplicate items due to an Aliexpress website bug.

A few days ago I noticed some of the items in "My Orders" on Aliexpress were marked as "Unpaid" and Aliexpress was asking for me to pay them.  I clicked on them to pay them.  Big mistake.

On my bank account I now have both the original charges (they were paid days ago!) and the new ones (still pending). On Aliexpress I now have two orders of each item :|



I try the Aliexpress chat bot (*shudder*).  Eventually I snag the keywords "duplicate payment".  They ask for a writeup and picture proof.  I immediately get this canned email:

Dear Customer,

Regarding your query about payment value of your order, please note payment for each order could be received only once in our system.

Possible reasons of double/multiple payments:

    Payment was triggered mutiple times and processed successfully. Refund will be processed to you automatically in this case. Normally, it takes 3-20 workings days for you to receive it in your bank account
    Payment for another order with same value. You may also go to 'My Order' and double check if any other order with same value under your account.
    Bank hold on money temporary. Sometimes, bank sends message for payment authorization first and deduct money from your account after payment captured. In total, money will be removed once only in this case.


If you still have concern about this value, please double check with bank if possible. Thanks for your support to AliExpress!

Respectfully,
AliExpress Customer Service Team

Note:Please do not reply to this email/message due to reply can not be received in this mailbox. If you have any further question, please visit our Help Center for assistance.

Fuck you too.

Now to try and find some other way of solving this.  Hah.  This problem doesn't fit into a neat box they already have a help centre solution or chatbot script for.  How can I possibly prove it happened the way I say it did?  I didn't take screenshots of them saying "Unpaid" a few days ago and now everything says I ordered twice.

[tom66]

I've noticed a concerning quantity of companies making it effectively impossible to contact them - or as hard as possible.

I wanted to contact a prospective home insurer to query a term on their policy but there was no option to speak to a human.  It was all run around in circles back to help center or automated telephone system.  Guess what, I did not buy a policy from them.

I swear some companies spend money on SEO to get their contact phone number off the internet.  You can usually find it with a bit of digging, but sometimes they don't even have one except for essentials.

Amazon are doing something similar though you can still speak to humans on the phone or chat if you're dedicated enough,  it's not an obvious link on their website though.

For your AliExpress order, the best you can probably do is chargeback at the cc company and write an email to the general support email address.  If they send you an email in complaint then just repeat the same email to them.  Duplicate order due to website error, unable to cancel, used consumer rights.  Nothing wrong with that.

[Whales]

Chargebacks tend to ban you from platforms.  It's better to solve from the inside.

I found a way of getting a human from the chatbot!  Say the magic words "How do I report a scam" and you are given the option of talking to an "agent"!

They asked for lots of details, then asked me for a few minutes whilst they try to work things out.  I went to do a pee, came back and discovered I had been automatically kicked off the chat session due to inactivity.  >:|  Trying again now. 

EDIT: The timeout is 60 seconds.  It'd be hilarious if government services offices worked like this.  "I've taken more than a few minutes to process your form and you didn't say anything, go back outside!".

[Whales]

Update: the best they can do is tell me to:

(1) Ask the two "To Ship" sellers if they will let me cancel the orders
(2) Wait for a later date for when I can dispute the two "Awaiting delivery" items.

Apparently disputing the items won't hurt the sellers.  Apparently.   



Why do I feel like that either the buyer (me) or the sellers are going to lose out because of this, rather than the responsible party (Aliexpress).

[Whales]

I've noticed a concerning quantity of companies making it effectively impossible to contact them - or as hard as possible.

Yep.

The amount of time it took multiple of their "agents" to try and help me... I think it would have been cheaper for them to accept emails instead.

I swear some companies spend money on SEO to get their contact phone number off the internet.  You can usually find it with a bit of digging, but sometimes they don't even have one except for essentials.

In this case I don't think they even have an email address.

[Whales]

Lol of course I'm not allowed any evidence that this conversation ever took place.  This agent's chat session will self destruct in ten seconds.



EDIT: It's an iframe, saving it to html seems to work

[ebastler]

I try the Aliexpress chat bot (*shudder*).  Eventually I snag the keywords "duplicate payment".  They ask for a writeup and picture proof.  I immediately get this canned email:
[...]
Fuck you too.

Well, they had a point with their reply. You did not make a duplicate payment (for the same order), but you placed a duplicate order (due to misleading information on the AliExpress site).

I avoid those online chats (bot or human agent) if I possibly can, for the very reasons and frustrations which you described. Googling for "Aliexpress cancel order" brings up a reasonably helpful Aliexpress support page as the first hit: https://service.aliexpress.com/page/knowledge?pageId=37&category=1000021992&knowledge=1060015065&language=fr. This scenario is probably the relevant one for you:

When your order status is "Awaiting Shipment”: You can cancel your order with the seller's approval. Please click the button [Cancel Order] on order detail page, select a reason for cancellation, then [Submit] the request. Please contact the seller for their approval to speed up the process.

[wraper]

Well, you should request order cancellation for items which did not ship yet. However I doubt you can do anything about orders which were already dispatched other than receiving and requesting return. You could do a chargeback but you likely will be banned and sellers will be basically scammed out of the goods they already shipped. If there is no shipment tracking progress, you can try contacting sellers who supposedly dispatched the items as it could be they created a tracking number but did not actually dispatch it yet.

[tszaboo]

I had a similar issue, somehow I ended up paying twice for an item, and they refunded me within a week. Didn't even had to open a dispute.

[Whales]

Well, they had a point with their reply. You did not make a duplicate payment (for the same order), but you placed a duplicate order (due to misleading information on the AliExpress site).

It's the closest I could find after lots of chatting with the chatbot for about an hour.  Support should not be a slot machine.

I'm not offended by them saying no.  I'm offended by them saying no and then also:

(1) Not helping me find the right way of solving the problem.
(2) Telling me this is a brick wall, go away, we won't reply or discuss this further.
(3) Telling me to take an inappropriate action (show my bank this email & evidence if I still have a problem) that would probably get me banned from their platform.  Did they seriously think this through?

In retrospect it's easy to say "that's not a duplicate transaction" because they provided strict definitions after the fact.  That's about as rude as going to someone at a front desk, explaining your problem, then being told to leave the moment you use slightly the wrong words according to their internal corporate dictionary. 

"But I did pay twice" "That's not a duplicate payment, go away, we will not reply, we will not allow you to engage further unless you come back another day".  You're now standing outside again, in the rain, clutching your receipts and planning what words you will use before entering their building again.

I avoid those online chats (bot or human agent) if I possibly can, for the very reasons and frustrations which you described. Googling for "Aliexpress cancel order" brings up a reasonably helpful Aliexpress support page as the first hit:

Solving this myself feels very unwise.  If it was caused by a website/db sync bug: what other problems might occur when I cancel?  Perhaps it will cancel my original orders but not both transactions.  I might even inadvertently do things that are against the site's rules.   I've dug myself into holes before trying to solve problems on purchase/payment sites from my end, I've learned that you have to immediately get on the phone with the company.  Often they'll tell you it's a transient bug until payments are cleared or something similar, ie "don't touch anything".

I have now cancelled two of them, as per support's advice, and the other two I'll have to dispute at a later date when that feature gets unlocked on the orders, as per support's advice.  If things go skewiff I'm going to have to waste more hours, but at least I have some chat transcripts as evidence that I'm doing "the right thing" at all times.

I had a similar issue, somehow I ended up paying twice for an item, and they refunded me within a week. Didn't even had to open a dispute.

Good to hear   I presume that you didn't have duplicate orders too, however?  Maybe they automatically were able to fix that.

"Dispute" is an Aliexpress-internal term that (I think) means "dispute with seller" not "dispute with Aliexpress", but I may be wrong.

[ebastler]

I avoid those online chats (bot or human agent) if I possibly can, for the very reasons and frustrations which you described. Googling for "Aliexpress cancel order" brings up a reasonably helpful Aliexpress support page as the first hit:

Solving this myself feels very unwise.  If it was caused by a website/db sync bug: what other problems might occur when I cancel?

I don't see a fundamental difference between following the guidance of the Aliexpress chatbot vs. following the guidance of an Aliexpress support webpage. I guess my point was mainly that I find these chatbots to be a very inefficient way to convey information. I'd much rather do a Google search, then I can skim through the results quickly and hone in on what looks relevant.

[Whales]

You misunderstand.

In the end I followed advice from a human representing Aliexpress after explaining my problem to them.    Not advice from a chatbot or a support page (if we ignore my attempt with "double payment", but that was clearly not considered appropriate by Aliexpress).  Aliexpress' chat bot and support pages do not have instructions on how to handle website bugs. 

"Cancelling orders" and "disputing" are choices that can be made in a number of circumstances that have complex ramifications, especially if the seller disagrees.  Neither the Aliexpress chat bot nor support pages will help me if this happens.  Obtaining direct advice from a human being who works at the company is the only appropriate action when dealing with website bugs involving financial transactions and multiple parties.  Any mistakes made on my part when trying to solve these problems, eg if I follow something I found via Google or interpreted in my favour from the support pages, can/will be blamed on me if I first do not get advice from the platform operators.

[ebastler]

All good, as long as you have eventually found a solution, or at least a partial one. But the solution you describe in reply #3 is exactly what the support webpage (i.e. the first Google hit) suggest, right? Just sayin' that you could have gotten there with less aggravation.

[Whales]

BUMP

It's happened again (but this time I'm not paying).  It looks like the duplicate orders were made on the same day I made the actual orders, notice that everything is shown twice in the screenshot below.

In my original post I thought my ordered were duplicated after I repaid them, not before.  Perhaps I was wrong and they were duplicates from the start. 

Aliexpress is the only ordering website I've ever had these issues on.  This latest order was placed by me on a single computer with one cart in one session on one day.

Maybe the alix cart or order submission system isn't properly atomic'ing cart order submissions?  Any of the following could then potentially cause this (non exhaustive): my web browser resending due to failed TCP connection (bad internet/routing/servers), me manually refreshing due to broken page loading (sometimes Alix's website doesn't work at all and you have to come back later), database backends not synchronising correctly (order request records duplicating).  This is one of the many problems that online cart systems have to tackle, it's why web browsers warn you that certain actions (eg pressing the back button) may "re-submit" things and why websites redirect you to "order has already been made" pages sometimes.

Either way: this is a Aliexpress website bug to be wary of.  The one shopping cart on Aliexpress can be ordered "twice" without you realising.  Same computer, same session, user only thinks they have done it once. 

It is the responsibility of the sales platform to ensure only the agreed items are ordered, it is not the responsibility of the user to fix the platform's internal bookkeeping (and risk making unintentional payments).  In practice yes unfortunately you often have to fix other company's paperwork for them because they suck (I used to work admin, if you ever have then you know how bad some companies are at even simple things like actually providing invoices), but that doesn't make it right.  Not offering full cancels + refunds immediately to correct the error is even worse.

I suspect this time support will tell me again to manually cancel the orders.  I'm going to do my best, but I can't help but feel like I'm going to somehow end up with them telling me I've cancelled the wrong orders or otherwise done something wrong.  Let's hope not. 

For the moment I can't get a human on the chat so I won't do anything.  I already looked at the "cancel order" feature on these unpaid items and it wants to know why I want "a refund", which of course makes me feel like something totally wrong is about to happen if I continue.

[thm_w]

At least this time it says Awaiting Payment, hopefully it means no payment was processed yet.
This can happen if you try to pay and the payment is rejected (bad CC expiry, etc.).

But yeah, I would still go in and manually cancel them all.