Aliexpress is pretty good, far better than poxy Epay where a seller can cancel your purchase if they feel like they might have sold it for more. Some Ahole seller did that to me a little while back on a P6021 current probe that I'd sniped for a what I thought was a fair price but instead the hungry Ahole pulled the plug and wouldn't go through with the sale. Prick !
Had stuff not turn up from Aliexpress but the resent item was received and I particularly like the concept of how Escrow holds your funds until you confirm receipt of goods.
IMHO the Aliexpress platform is too good to abuse.
I've had the opposite experience and recently mostly switched to eBay for all my "far-east" purchases.
Bought an item worth ~€70, which was shipped by some generic Chinese shipping service that included tracking.
At some point, the tracking showed the item as delivered, although no package ever arrived. Checked with neighbors, was not left anywhere near the entrance, I receive countless packages at this address and never had an issue.
The tracking number is only valid on the company's tracking page, and is not recognized by the local post so I had no way to investigate what happened on my own.
Opened a dispute, seller stated that he would check with the shipping company but did not reply after several days (was expecting that), Aliexpress stepped in and after review sided with seller without even waiting or pushing the seller to provide additional information.
On one hand it's sort of expected that with the amount of orders they process they don't care too much about such types of complaints, but this wasn't exactly a cheap throw-away item so I was hoping for a bit more effort put into the review process.
eBay certainly has issues and for some items I can't find any other source than Aliexpress, but this experience left me quite scared of ordering anything of real value from there.