At least for what I buy from aliexpress, it hasn’t been infiltrated by fake reviews.
Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.
(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)
Lots of incomprehensible or useless human ones though.
(And bad machine translations by aliexpress…)
Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.
Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."
Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."
In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.
And most of the products I've seen "grouped" in this way haven't had identifiable branding, they were just generic functional products like "heat shrink", or "M4x20 screws".
I'd sure like to know if I'm buying counterfeits, and, unless the product is identified as "Counterfeit Such-and-such" or the platform can otherwise identify them, it doesn't help me for reviews of the counterfeit product to be lumped in with reviews of legitimate ones. (And, if the platform can identify the counterfeits, then it should be taking them down, not showing me cleverly mingled reviews.)
One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.
In the case of knives, they may be perfectly fine. Or QC's spot testing of that batch may have revealed defects in the metal, and a small number of them may shatter unexpectedly.
This is why I'm fine buying some categories of items from AliExpress et al., and not others.
I have a Leatherman Skeletool and a Buck 110 knife, and both are such high quality for what feels like a reasonable price (especially considering the warranty), I just can't imagine chinesium beating it. Yes, I know Nextool exists, but I would just be too wary that there's gonna be a batch where the factory or QC skimped on quality. Snapping a multi-tool or even worse a knife can have serious consequences.
Afiact, the Main good vendors are green thorn, lemifshe and jufule currently. But if you ask the vendors detailed questions before spending money they seem pretty honest.
As for a blade steel breaking, that should be less likely with Chinese blade heat treats since they all tends to err on the side of undershooting hardness and cap out at 60hrc. So in many cases way less brittle than a western heat treat if it’s the same steel
(average aliexpress review on many tech items)