Hacker News Reader

Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

I used to buy a lot from Temu. Till I got a product that fell apart after three months. I tried to leave a bad review, but Temu wouldn't allow it. If you're trying to leave 3 star rating or below, they redirect you to customer service. But since customer service only dealt with items under 45 days (as far as I remember), they would just tell me something like "too bad, you're out of luck".

So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.

This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.

View on HN

Ebay do something similar too. You can immediately provide positive feedback, but you have to wait 7 days to add negative feedback. This is ostensibly to encourage sellers to address issues to retain reputation. Sellers can also get negative feedback removed after the fact by doing refunds, etc.

This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly. A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.

Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.

Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing. 2 out of 3 items fit and 1 out of 3 is decent quality. That's still cheaper, depending on what tariffs your country is charging.

I wouldn't buy something where a warranty would be useful from them.

Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.

AliExpress is great for electronics. Not the „I need a phone“ stuff (although for that it’s fine too, I think), but more the „I need an ESP-32 module“.

This. People buying a laptop there for ten bucks then receiving the photo of one have indeed all the rights to complain, but common sense should suggest them before the purchase the old saying that if something looks too good to be true... And this can happen everywhere there's no strict quality control or accountability. Aliexpress is great for small modules, SBCs, diy electronics in general, however I wouldn't ever buy semiconductors, batteries or memory modules there, as the risk of fakes or low quality clones is close to 100%.

Yeah especially as in places like London there have been many explosions and house fires originaying from cheap foreign e-bike batteries.

Some Chinese companies care about a long-term brand and place high standards on themselves but it's not true that anything online has passed safety standards. It's hard to differentiate the two due to the amount of fake reviews also.

Yes, I would never buy something grid-powered from AliExpress, and I would be very careful with larger batteries.

Yes,also beware of power strips and electrical wires in general: those coming from there are increasingly made of coated iron instead of copper or brass in contacts. The side effect is a much higher resistance that makes the wire dissipate a lot more power than it should, even to the point it can overheat and catch fire if under serious load (heaters, ovens etc.). Their exceptionally bad insulation and usually smaller size than advertised make the problem even worse. Such bad cables can be used for breadboarding where small lengths and low currents mitigate the effects, but they shouldn't be considered for anything serious. I've learned to ditch almost every bundled cable coming from there after multiple bad experiences. Surplus is a good source of top notch cables that can last decades. Crappy cables can be checked using a magnet: pure copper ones won't stick. There are also reports of junk coated aluminium cables that wouldn't stick as well to a magnet, but they're rare as aluminium, at least good quality one, is not cheap.

Concur. Even a planetary, cycloidal or strain wave reducers. To be honest, I don't know, where else I could find such diverse product catalog.

Mouser/Farnell etc don't have those? Or i guess not as many options.

I got my last esp-32 from Mouser iirc. In Europe. They finally sorted out EU fulfillment warehouses.

You can get the base ESP-32 modules for example, but not most of the Dev Boards. They have some, but much more expensive than AliExpress. And then you also have to pay shipping.

> And then you also have to pay shipping.

Spoiled americans :) I've always had to pay shipping from anywhere outside my country.

It's basically McMaster with slow shipping for my hobby projects. I don't need the $1000 quality and warranty of a McMaster ball screw and linear guideways, the $80 BSTMOTION brand(?) stuff has been working for me for years and is plenty accurate.

Not entirely.

For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.

I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.

The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.

Obviously YMMV, but I bought some Amazon MTB pedals rated 4.7 starts @ 9k ratings. One suffered a catastrophic failure, shearing off at the crank and I was pitched over the bars.

Design and manufacturing is obviously a major part of the equation with this product sector, and no doubt the Chinese can do that as good as, or even better than domestic brands in many respects. What they don't do as well, as far as I'm aware, is any significant destructive testing.

The bonus is I can now spend even more absurd amounts of money on bike components, which is the true dream of any true cycling enthusiast.

> Obviously YMMV, but I bought some Amazon MTB pedals rated 4.7 starts @ 9k ratings.

Every site is different, no? Amazon isn't AliExpress. Though lately Amazon if flooded with marked-up AliExpress stuff. I'm not fond of Amazon, their customer service is more of a hit and miss since various years.

That said, I've been watching Trace Velo. He reviews a lot of AliExpress cycling things. It's often bad after prolonged use. Meaning, yeah, their testing is lacking. But some brand do seem to be trying to become a trusted brand. E.g. Ugreen nowadays is often trusted. It used to be one of the many things listed on AliExpress.

Amazon is AliExpress with onshore warehousing.

Except the brands I'm talking about sell directly - the stuff you're buying on Amazon is the cheapest drop shipped products on Ali marked up ridiculously to extract the maximum profit.

Amazon is AliExpress without the free market.

Amazon is just not a good place to go, you're going to be buying something very low cost that someone is drop-shipping as a way to maximise their profit, not provide a good product.

You need to know the brands to buy (Trace Velo, Peak Torque and China Cycling helps here) and buy directly from their Ali Express store, or from their website.

Amazon is only if you need a cheap bike maintenance tool within a couple of days that you're happy only using a few times before you have to throw it out. Not for components.

useless to know the brand. Amazon will change the seller every time you see an item, and pretend the reviews apply. then the new seller will ship you counterfeits while selling under the good brand and reviews. after a few sales, seller bestbikesbrooklin7456, is banned and you are offered bestevercyclesocal888 and the cycle restart.

> For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.

Do you follow Trace Velo on YouTube? Any others you recommend (aside from China Cycling)?

I do!

I also follow Peak Torque, who is very hot on engineering. Hambini is ok, but pretty brash and abrasive.

> For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.

Their products can also be bought either directly or from other bike-specialized shops, they don't sell exclusively through Aliexpress.

Yes, that's very true - they also sell outside AliExpress D2C on their own sites.

It tends to work out cheaper with the various AliExpress deals you can stack together to buy from there though.

> The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies.

Not just better value for money, I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.

A recent example: I was looking for something to balance the 3rd axis on my telescope, There are very few products on the market from mainstream brands and none were what I needed. On Ali I easily found several options. These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.

Same goes for storage bags and cases. You can often find a bag or case specifically made for your device, while there isn’t anything for sale locally.

Yeah, there are loads of cables, converters etc. that I can't get even from Amazon. Aliex has been the only place.

> I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.

I recently needed some bearings for a project. I wanted them quickly, so AliExpress would take too long. I visited 5 local stores and none of them sold the bearings I needed. AliExpress had 200 sellers selling them in every possible type for a decent price.

Ended up buying AliExpress quality from Amazon for a higher price because they shipped faster.

>These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.

Nothing can break but the metal can be alloyed with lead to make it easier to machine or coated in something toxic.

Likewise in trail running, Aonijie is building a decent reputation for accessories.

> Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing.

As long as you don't value safety.[1]

[1]: https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/skin-melted...

If you actually read the article you see this garment lacked a "flammable" label. It's not the flammability that wouldn't happen, it's just a tiny warning.

This article is outrage bait, especially obvious given the incredibly graphic pictures and the high focus on emotional statements combined with the low amount of actually important detail (what went wrong? It's not what you or the article are implying, which is the fire risk).

> Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.

I bought a bunch of parts for a racing drone from Aliexpress because I didn't expect a traditional retailer's warranty to really matter much. ("This frame has been in a crash. No warranty.") What's the point of paying extra in that scenario?

My experience (with Aliexpress) is that you usually get what you pay for.

I had bad reviews been supressed by amazon several as well, so at this point I'm assuming any review system is theater.

Amazon definitely don't do anything like this.

I've only ever left one bad review on Amazon. Chopsticks, they came bound together with some sticky tape. Sticky tape left a very sticky area just where your hands go that I was unable to get off despite a lot of effort scrubbing, washing, and so on. I left a polite constructive review saying they were good chopsticks but watch out for this stickiness issue. My review was declined by Amazon on the grounds it didn't meet their "community guidelines" (without elaborating further on which rule I'd supposedly broken).

They must have thought it was a bad dad joke.

Amazon is known for suppressing negative reviews, there are many reports about it. Not sure why the grandparent comment is claiming the contrary - not doing the automatic redirect maybe, but they do remove or just not accept negative reviews.

You don't have a glue removal spray? :)

I bought one to get sticker residue off my windshield, but it's proven useful many times since.

Mind, considering how well it removes glue, I wouldn't stick anything that was touched by it in my mouth... but may be okay for the hand end of your chopsticks.

Can you recommend your glue removal spray which is food safe? Because the entirety of cutlery needs to remain food safe, not just the pointy end.

My mother swears by "Goo Gone": https://googone.com/

Of course, after you use it, I would recommend to wash the cutlery.

Here are the ingredients:

   Product Name: Goo and Adhesive Remover Spray Gel
   Product Code: 2096, 2137C
   Ingredients CAS No. Function
   Petroleum distillates 64742-47-8 Solvent
   Aliphatic ether alcohol Withheld Solvent
   d-Limonene 5989-27-5 Solvent
   Polymer Withheld Thickener
   Orange sweet extract 8028-48-6 Solvent
   Solvent orange 60 6925-69-5 Colorant
   Solvent red 18 6483-64-3 Colorant

I would probably use some lens cleaning ether without perfume.

Just wash the cutlery afterwards? Dish soap isn't food safe either for that matter.

I recommend isopropyl alcohol. It’s cheap, versatile and works like a charm for most of your cleaning jobs. Way safer and cheaper than sprays and "super-do-that-thing-4000". No offense to the sprayers.

Not for Austrian road tax stickers. That's specifically what made me get the spray.

Orange oil works wonders. It's explicitly not food safe, but you get that stuff on your hand every time you peel an orange and it's also present in juice. Just rinse them afterwards and wear gloves.

Paste made from sodium bicarbonate and vegetable oil is good at getting sticky label residue off glass jars.

The community guidelines rejection is such BS. I've done thousands of Amazon reviews and get about 1% rejection rate, and it's always baffling as to the cause. You develop superstition over time over what is the cause. I avoid certain words (sexual, violence, mention of other brands), blur our barcodes, etc. "Sticky" would trigger my "uh oh, sounds sexual" alarm and I'd word it something like "tape around chopsticks left adhesive residue". Like I said, superstition.

Ok, well I've left nine 1-star and many other 2 or more star reviews and none of them have been removed for any reason, so I would say you got unlucky and that I stand by my comment that Amazon don't do anything like automatically redirecting all 1-star reviews to customer service.

They absolutely do, it's personally happened to me. My review was rejected because I simply listed what items were included in the box, one of them being a card that offered a bribe for a positive review.

Every review I left for Amazon products (Amazon EU) got rejected until it was diluted into nothing. The explanation was always vague, listing a dozen possible reasons, none of which fit what I wrote.

On non-Amazon products it's a coin toss for negative reviews. Many are published, some are not. Can't explain why.

Google is not better, negative reviews I leave on Maps are published very selectively. Maybe big-tech found a way to monetize this too. I know sites like Yelp are more or less an extortion business where you pay to get negative reviews wiped.

I bought a pcie wifi card on amazon.

It came with a "get $20 if you leave a 5 star review" card in it.

I took a picture and included it in my review.

Amazon declined to publish it.

So, they do shady shit like this for sure.

Seller-side here. Amazon combine my author page, with that of A.A. Milne. Some of my products show up under the deceased author, some of his under mine. Reviews for one particular product are combined.

My seller ID is separate, my last name is also Milne, but my first is James.

He wrote a book called "The Red House Mystery", I wrote an homage to it because I am related to the man, called "Red House". Different products, with different ISBNs.

Combined reviews. [0]

That's not exactly a fair process for customers - and no, I can't get them uncombined. I've been trying for years. But if the seller can't get rid of something completely misleading, that seems to have been caused by a very badly automated process, then there are processes at Amazon that cause problems.

[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Red-House-James-Milne-ebook/dp/B0C...

I've never (to my knowledge) had a review on Amazon rejected, and I've left very some negative reviews, including when I received counterfeit items.

I always thought the review scams on Amazon were more driven by the third-party sellers doing stuff like listing takeover, astroturfing reviews, bribing customers for good reviews, etc., but maybe I'm wrong. I have personally received multiple offers from third-party sellers of incentives to leave good reviews.

Either you've never used amazon or you are lying in bad faith.

Neither does Temu. They're misrepresenting what Temu does, at least in my experience.

If you choose a star rating below five, Temu asks if you'd like to request a refund or seek other assistance. The one time I said yes -- it was a keyboard where a shift key wouldn't trigger consistently at the peculiar angle that my typing style hit it at -- it immediately gave me a 100% refund and said just keep it.

But I've left other low-star rating without trouble. The refund/assistance suggestion is an entirely optional sidetrack.

I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules.

More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.

Amazon took down one of my reviews because I included a picture of the item's manual which had a page offering to pay for Amazon reviews (the item had unanimous 5 star reviews). To me that seemed like valuable info and legitimate context to include in a review but even after I appealed they disagreed because my picture was "irrelevant".

You're supposed to report review manipulation offers to Amazon. Reviews are for the product itself, not the seller (in theory multiple sellers can offer the same product, but for alphabet soup brands that's never the case).

The review manipulation offer was boxed up in the shrinkwrapped package so from my POV that made it part of the product. If the seller is altering the product then IMO its fair game to review. If a seller removed the batteries or put a sticker on the product I'd consider that an alteration to be part of the product itself... as opposed to when reviews complain about stuff like the seller's shipping speed which is orthogonal to what's in the box being shipped.

How convenient that the information only goes to Amazon, who can choose to do nothing, and isn't allowed to go out to other customers to help them make a purchasing decision.

> I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon

Why did you do that? Did they pay you? Or did you get the stuff for free?

You forgot to ask 'Do you live in a high-trust society?' - or maybe you didn't?

Building common goods is one thing. Free labor for a corporation (that can at any time decide to throw it away if it's not profitable enough) is another thing.

Yeah I get the items for free in exchange of honest reviews, look up Amazon Vine, it's an official Amazon program.

Note that if anything they are more stringent with the quality of the reviews we need to write, not less.

>More than 50% of those are below 3 stars.

Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?

>They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.

While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.

Some people treat it like an adventure or a gamble or are just too curious, they know it's hit or miss but it's cheap and usually you can return it easily. See Atomic Shrimp channel for example. I don't get those people but I don't judge

> Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?

I get them for free, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690563

> While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.

Most of my reviews are for items with very little reviews due to the nature of Vine, so I can directly see the impact of my score on the average score.

You really expect that kind of support from something ahipped across the globe for peanuts? Ali/Temu and the kind serve specific purposes and they do it well.

I find reviews on those sites still useful, and at least on Ali there are a fair number of negative ones as well. Users tell if a specific part works with Home Assistant or zigbee2mqt.

I suggest to sort by order number and not stars.

The "kind of support" they say they expect is the ability to leave a negative review. That doesn't seem too extreme of an expectation honestly. The only reason support came into the picture is that Temu redirected them to support.

But that is unfair competition against rule-abiding vendors. Platforms like Ali and Temu should face the most strict limitations for that alone.

"That kind of support" is the absolute bare minimum. If you're not even providing that then you're not fit to sell anything, at any price.

We have gotten to the point where you can't leave a bad review on aggregation sellers (like Temu/Ali/Amazon) because if you could, your competitor will for sure buy some farm in Taiwan/wherever and destroy your reputation.

The closest thing to Amazon made in Latin America is almost the same thing, I'm talking of course about Mercadolibre.com, you can ask a refund for a product but if you do you cannot leave a review at all, and the products with bad scores have their scores and their reviews hidden, that's why is impossible to find a single product with less than 4 stars, and they have millions of them, it's as shady as it gets.

Whats the goal here? Like, with amazon they don't own most of the products they sell, so presumably leaving a bad review doesn't bother amazon much, but what about temu?

Temu is about offering a convenient hyper fast shopping channel to Chinese manufacturers with customers worldwide, primarily for clothing. A product which sells for months/years and gathers reviews is not part of their vision. Their customers don't need reviews (sales numbers is everything), but the users expect them, so they are there.

In Brazil there's Shopee, which honestly, I find way better than Temu...

Shopee has even worse behavior around reviews. You can't even leave a review past the first few days, and they bribe you with shopee points to leave a review.

The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.

If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.

Shopee allows you to post follow-up reviews, and gives you a grace period of 45 days to post reviews.

If you want compare, at least compare with facts.

I just checked and I cannot edit any old ratings. Maybe it's something you can only do through the app?

I can't install the app because I travel between countries and they block my Google account from installing the local app. I'm sure there's ways around that but I'd rather just use the website.

I use shopee and find the reviews fair. Like everything else, you have to learn how to take the most out of a limited system.

My experience so far has been good. Negative reviews seem fair, and give a good indication of what to expect (maybe I've lowered my expectations from the start).

Aliexpress has the same problem, quite frustrating.

I can find some bad reviews on items that have a lot of positive reviews on Aliexpress. Seems like they don't completely filter all of them.

But they do have a time limit on leaving a review, as far as I can tell.

They have a 30 day time frame to leave a review. That's why so many reviews just say "Everything arrived on time" and none of them say "this thing broke after 31 days".

AliExpress highly encourages leaving a review. They also encourage taking pictures. As a result, loads of random pictures in reviews.

You can do an additional remarks later, but I often don't bother. It's drowned out anyway.

What I often do is read the reviews. What's usually done is a critical review and still 5 stars. The fake reviews are pretty easily spotted. It shouldn't be this way, but in my experience it's still better than Amazon. With Amazon more effort is made to fake a review.

If you read the aliexpress reviews, there are a lot of 5-stars totally bashing the product.

Do you buy anything based on reviews there? They're obviously silly and exchanged for discounts and "coins" so I just ignore them in a way I don't elsewhere.

I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.

No, I treat AE reviews as written by the manufacturer. Sometimes I'll look to see if a legitimate user has posted something wrong with the product, or a caveat, but I never pay attention to the rating.

I've had almost solely good experiences with AE, but it does take experience to shop there (never trust the photos, if the price is too cheap it's a scam, batteries are always fake, etc).

> it does take experience to shop there

Amen, and resilience. It's a combative UX, trying to force you into bundles instead of single purchases, Choice items rather than cheaper with regular p&p, not advertising that some things (eg bare lithium cells) will be shipped seemingly by sailors chucking corked glass bottles into the sea and hoping they get to you within three business years.

I've not had too much of a problem with outright scams. Some things have been smaller than expected (photo issues - description accurate) and if it's delicate (eg plywood robot models, larger foam planes) they will find a way to grind it into dust before delivery. Both those examples got a refund the next day.

But it's cheap when it works but the central company appears to be honest and helpful when you contact them.

I did have one or two items being scams, eg a mosquito bite pen that ended up being empty inside, or a 2TB USB disk that actually just had a trashy MicroSD card inside, but both cost $3 so I knew they were scams when I got them (I was just curious).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com