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Comment by xanderstrike | Hacker News Reader

That's what I'm figuring. AliExpres's bread and butter is dirt cheap computer components and wholesale chargers and stuff for gas stations and the like. Their margin on that $100 android tablet is big enough to cover the shipping loss on hundreds of $0.03 buttons.

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Aliexpress won't loss money, but vendors do.

Then why would they sell the 3-cent buttons?

So that people who need a 3-cent button use the service, are impressed by it and become higher margin customers later on.

Is there really any vendor loyalty on a site like AliExpress though? It just doesn't seem that likely to pay off. On the other hand, I assume the amount the vendor is losing on a transaction like this is also minuscule, so maybe it would.

I feel like I'm subconsciously much more loyal to services I have used than I would otherwise like to think. There is so much other stuff going on and I just can't be bothered going through the (probably easy) task of understanding a new service. So I just go back to the service that I've already used, know works, and does amazing things like ship 3 cent buttons for nothing.

But it's not the service you need to be loyal to in order for this to pay off, it's the specific vendor selling that 3 cent button, since they're the one losing money on the transaction.

Most vendors on AliExpress only sell such low-cost items in lots, so you could, for example, only buy these buttons by the dozen. Although that still means you end up with a margin that is ridiculously instead of ludicrously small.

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