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Comment by _lbaq | Hacker News Reader

The hidden cost is the enormous strain it puts on the environment...

Unless one of the cases is manufactured under considerably different environmental standards and locally that isn’t the case.

The higher price on Amazon is due to two factors - local reseller markup and expedited shipping.

Heck many AlizonExpress sellers will have multiple listings for the same product at different prices based on how fast they’ll ship.

So we can safely assume that both items ship from China.

So we can more or less safely assume that both are shipped from China.

Now when you wait 4-6 weeks for a delivery from China you are essentially waiting for them to fill a container, when you pay more for a shipping you pay for the extra shipping space wasted by expediting your shipping.

This is because of how international shipping economics work, international shipping is economical when it’s full to the brim since shipping companies have a flat tonnage tax.

This means that shipping companies are taxed based on the total tonnage capacity of their vessels not the actual amount or value of the goods they transfer.

Unless you source something locally in a manner that it’s actually environmentally more sounds that statement is false.

And don’t forget that even buying locally doesn’t guarantee any better environmental outcome, for example buying a 3D printed case form someone on Etsy is likely just if not more polluting than buying an injection molded case from China since the filament, resin and heck even the 3D printer itself came form China.

I used to run a small business when I was in college in Canada 2010-2012, selling sunglasses on Ebay, and later Amazon.

It was super low effort. Buy wholesale on Alibaba, tell the seller to send goods to packing, and silkscreen shop, and send by regular post to my apartment. Very often, fancy packaging was costing more than sunglasses themselves.

Even when I was buying crate loads of goods, I only got a customs bill only like 2 times out of 10 in 3 years. Customs bill was pretty much nothing, and they never contested the valuation, but the extra paperwork was very unpleasant at the time when I had to study.

Then you sell $1-$2-$3 sunglasses at $100+ prices. Just make decent websites for all made up brands you have, have good marketing fluff, and make sure to call them with some Italian/French sounding name.

You make at around 10-15 sells per month, but what else you want with that level of effort? Second to that, I was very unsure of my tax/legal status at large if that business were to become too big. Being kicked out of the country, with all my money in that degree wouldn't be fun.

When I was at high school I used to import all kinds of memory card adapters from dealextreme and sell them on immediately for 10x the price on ebay. My dad ended up helping me pay taxes on the money I made because it was actually getting really significant

>>Even when I was buying crate loads of goods, I only got a customs bill only like 2 times out of 10 in 3 years.

Tbf, you should have been paying for every crate, even if the customs agency didn't intercept it. It's up to you to make sure the duties are paid - if you ever got caught you would have been wholly responsible for not paying the duties even if you weren't asked to. But yeah, I know how it works in practice.

Did you ever check to see if they filtered UV correctly?

I'm sure, I was at least not picking polycarbonate glasses for reason they look, and feel too toyish, and too many of them would be scratched in transit/pop out of frames unless overmolded.

For the same reason, I did not risk buying plastic frames. They break/bend too easily.

I'm still amazed that Chinese factories managed to make optical grade glass, cut, and polished for glasses almost as cheap as molded polycarbonate.

It should be the exact opposite.

When buying fake sunglasses or unknown orgin, always buy polycarbonate plastic lenses as these filter out most UV light.

It's the fake glass lenses that are a culprit and can be very harmful to your eyes.

I have tested this with a UV light.

Do you have a source for that or can you elaborate?

Since the delivery time is so long, I’d expect the parcel gets shipped with multiple others.

The only items that get shipped are the ones that have been actually bought, which sounds efficient.

Of course there are negative aspects too and I wouldn’t know if the overall outcome is positive or negative, when compared to buying a product from Amazon.

Again, a link or more details would be very helpful.

With the enormous amount of stuff people order from AliExpress, it seems unreasonable that all of it gets shipped via excess capacity.

I mean that's pretty much the whole trick to it. It gets to the boat with the rest of the mail, and batched with all the other people are shipping to the US, and then delivered to your door with the rest of the mail.

I can't imagine that there's a significant environmental impact outside of what it already takes for normal imports and and your daily mail.

Of course it gets shipped with others, and if delivery takes weeks or months, it probably gets shipped fairly efficiently by sea. But it still gets shipped over a long distance. I'd rather see more local products and less intercontinental shipment except in cases where it's unavoidable.

Besides, a lot of products on AliExpress don't actually meet western safety standards. They're not allowed to be imported and sold here, but you can buy them abroad and ship them to a private customer. But they still won't meet our standards.

I don't really see a difference, as most of the consummer products are built in China and get shipped anyway...

I'm not denying the environmetal impact, but that's not from Ali Express, it's from us building everything there because it's cheaper.

Huge difference. Products that are intended to be sold overseas are made to comply with the recipient country's safety standards (although the Chinese are notorious for cheating around that in every way they can and quality control + liability is ultimately up to the importer). Random shit that you buy on alibaba, isn't.

There are several entire youtube channels dedicated to dismantling chinesium gadgets and showing how they'll burn your house down. Lack of reverse current protection, lack of overcurrent protection, trace spacing that's way too small and will arc under the right temp/humidity, mains side traces right next to each other, no grounding, ground shorted to neutral, under-rated caps and resistors that reach unsafely high temperatures, etc, etc.

There is an important difference between products built there and sold there, and products built there and sold here. The product have to obey safety and other standards of the country where they're sold. And those standards differ quite a lot between the EU and China. They can use banned chemicals, and fail many other requirements.

In the EU, products that conform to EU standards can be identified with a 'CE' logo[0], which means "Conformité Européenne". "Chinese Export" can have a deceptively similar logo[1] that does not guarantee such adherence at all, but still looks comforting to European customers of Chinese web shops. It's a blatant violation, but hard to stop, because it's a foreign sale shipped to private customers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking

[1] https://siloscordoba.com/blog/corporate/china-export-is-not-...

There's no such thing as a Chinese Export or China Export mark, it's an urban myth (see your own link).

Whether or not it exists seems to be mostly a matter of interpretation. Is the incorrect mark just a misprint while Chinese products with the correct mark are just as likely to fail to meet EU standards? Either way, that cheap products from China regularly fail the standards does not seem to be disputed by anyone. And if those products are sold in the EU, it's fairly easy to address, but if they're sold in China and mailed to the EU, it's not so easy to enforce. The problem remains the same, whether or not you see it as intentional or not.

It's the difference between deliberate (creating a confusing mark to legalistically "bypass" CE regulations - this is the myth) and negligence (China not bothering to enforce the standards set by other countries or even its own quality and safety standards - this is well known).

Germany seems to care more than other EU countries about such things like CE. They don't have trouble turning away imports based just because it's shipped to private customers.

Just ask people trying to receive PinePhones in Germany.

You don't have a german manual? Bye bye, try again later.

Similarly the UL logo and ETL Intertek logo serve the same purpose in the US. If something doesn’t have a UL logo it’s probably not safe.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree.

There may be ways to be greener by manufacturing near consumers... but that doesn't have much to do with amazon vs alibaba. These products are manufactured in the same places.

Not sure what tree you think I'm barking up. I do think the issue of local production and less transportation is an important issue; not everything is just about Amazon and Alibaba. But even if you just focus on those, Amazon at least has to obey local standards for the country in which they sell. Products from Aliexpress only obey Chinese standards, which are very different. And sometimes they ship with misleading logos which could suggest to European customers that they obey EU rules when they don't.

> Amazon at least has to obey local standards for the country in which they sell.

In theory. In practice resellers are free to dropship whatever they want from AliExpress to Amazon and sell at a markup.

True. Amazon also clearly has a problem with counterfeit goods (as addressed on HN repeatedly in the past), and that's not sufficiently enforced. But at least it's possible to enforce. That's not to easy when the shop is outside your jurisdiction.

I'm still not seeing your point.

This is an article about postage. It's not about counterfeits or locally produced goods.

Counterfeits are generally not locally produced and mostly come from China via the subsidized slow boat. The counterfeit industry exists on Amazon because the potential for profit is so high and the risk is almost non-existent.

This article is not just about postage. It's about how cheap postage from China has subsidized Chinese webshops selling cheap crap to Europe and the US.

> Products from Aliexpress only obey Chinese standards,

Not necessarily... In cases something s not marketed for the domestic market, Chinese electrical (and many others) standards do not apply.

And it is not something given even if they were...

> delivery takes weeks or months, it probably gets shipped fairly efficiently by sea.

No, most of goes around as airmail. In fact, actual physical transport times are super low.

In fact, sea shipments can be faster than that. There are container lines shipping Shenzhen-Losangeles in just 7-10 days.

> But it still gets shipped over a long distance.

So do Amazon products.

> I'd rather see more local products

How is that related? I asked for sources that would confirm claims about worse environmental impact of Aliexpress vs Amazon.

Just in terms of packaging waste it is definitely lower. Even tiny things from Amazon often come to me in a shoebox sized carboard box, even if they could have fit in a padded envelope or maybe even just shipped in the retail box. Ali Express things I have ordered almost universally come in a padded plastic envelope. I think there must be strong incentives to pack small and light, so the maximum amount of stuff fits in the container, whereas with Amazon the highest priority is to get it on the truck ASAP.

Isn't it rather that someone else is taking the shipping cost?

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