Changes in AliExpress customer service and dispute resolution behaviours

[A Smug Dill]

I say behaviours, because I'm not sure the AliExpress customer service attitudes changed, but the policies (which I haven't seen) and standard operating procedures certainly appear to have changed.

 

It used to be that I have to fight tooth and nail to win a dispute, and then sometimes I would still be out of pocket — by the non-nil shipping charge, or because it was less than a full refund of the purchase price — even if I successfully made my case. I had to gauge how large a percentage or part of the purchase price I could or should “reasonably” ask for, if something was less than a total disaster, when filling in the webform for lodging the dispute.

 

Things haven't significantly improved, with regard to the proportion of AliExpress orders I had to raise disputes recently. But now, it seems AliExpress also seemingly copied its competitor Temu's policy of offering a free return of the first item on each order. Furthermore, every time I raised a dispute lately, a refund was approved within minutes of my clicking on Send, and without requiring me to actual ship anything back on a prepaid label (as everything there had been fairly low-value). That's kinda nice, but…

 

… it isn't without problems, by completely taking away the nuances.

 

Case in point, I ordered 30 (more specifically, as line items on the order, three lots of 10 at once) glass bottles with aluminium screw-caps. They were all tossed into a consolidated shipping satchel (by AliExpress's depot staff, not the seller) without the protection of a box or case; but the individual lots of 10 had sufficient protection in the form of bubble wrap around them, than none of the glass containers broke or cracked. However, six out of the 30 caps were noticeably dented on the flat surface across the top of the cap, presumably without compromising their function of sealing the bottles. I wasn't happy, and I just wanted to let the seller know about it, and warn that a negative review was coming… just to gauge the response.

 

When I clicked on the speech bubble icon that meant “contact seller”, a Live Chat session popped up, and I was attended to by (presumably) a human operator and not a “bot”. I described what happened, sent a photo of the goods, and told him what I was about to do. He said he was “only an agent for the seller”, presumably meaning that he works for AliExpress in the capacity of an intermediary, and advised me to raise a refund request. I thought even asking for a 20% refund would be bordering on unreasonable, but he insisted that “we protect your rights. When you're ready, these are the instructions for requesting a refund.” After I left the review, I tried stepping through requesting a refund, and there weren't any questions about whether I wanted to return the goods or just get a refund, and how much of a refund I was requesting. Before I knew it, the request was considered submitted, and in under a minute I was notified by email that I was getting a full refund for the 30 bottles.

 

That's pretty unfair, even it is was to my advantage. AliExpress holds the funds due the sellers for their sales these days, until the transactions have been “cleared” without dispute (or are past the period when disputes could be lodged); so all it did was throwing the sellers' money at appeasing the platform's customers. AliExpress isn't out of pocket even a cent, when it punishes the sellers that way.

 

Then there's the (ongoing) case where AliExpress sent a consolidated shipment, which should have been addressed and delivered to my home, elsewhere — and that elsewhere was (a newspaper and magazine bricks-and-mortar outlet acting as) a pickup point some 25 minutes away from my address. It contained six orders from six different sellers, and there was no way they could have all got it wrong or corroborated in sending the goods to the same address of a self-collection facility I never used before and couldn't have selected. AliExpress insisted it was the sellers' fault, and when the situation was “escalated” for investigation, told me to just wait for the orders to expire for non-delivery and I'd get my money back. I wanted the goods I ordered, not my money back! Three escalations over the course of a week, and I couldn't get AliExpress to actually do anything for me. Finally, last Friday I went to the pickup point (since I had to be somewhere halfway there that afternoon), and collected the parcel. Five out of the six orders therein did not have an address label; but the sixth one was sealed in a padded envelope, on which there was a shipping label (applied by the individual seller) with my home address on it. How much more proof could one have, to know that it was the consolidated shipping staff that inexplicably put a different address on the outside of the parcel (but with my name on it), and the sellers had no part to play in that decision? I complained again, and made it clear I wanted ⑴ an apology, ⑵ an answer (with or without AliExpress having to conduct a thorough investigation) as to how that happened, so that the same type of situation could be avoided in the future, and ⑶ some gesture of compensation for the time I had to spend travelling to the pickup point and back to collect to misdirected parcel. Within hours, I got another email asking me to just go into the individual orders and request refunds for them. That would only punish the sellers who had done nothing wrong; what I wanted was for AliExpress to be contrite, admit error, and take a small by symbolic loss for that mistake; I'm not going to put the sellers out of pocket (even if only by a few dollars each) for AliExpress's wrongdoing.

 

So, I don't think AliExpress has become more customer service-oriented or thoughtful, but merely more brutal in its approach at the sellers' expense.

 

[Lithium466]

Good write up, that sums up my (limited) experience in dealing with Aliexpress lately. Hopefully that manichean policy doesn't cause too much abuses which would either deter sellers or raise prices.