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Comment by lubujackson | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see keyboard-mashed company names I know I can go to Temu/AliExpress and get it directly there. You can tell when they are all sourcing from the same batch and instead of paying $40 the same thing is often $3.28 if you don't mind waiting a week.

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I used to do this more often, but I find the gap is narrowing a lot. Most of the time I find I don't save enough to justify getting it in two weeks over 1 day.

The Aliexpress of 10 years ago was just ridiculous. One time I ordered something (a USB adapter) for literally a total price of 40¢, and it was delivered. It cost about 35¢ to send a regular US postcard domestically at the time, not counting the price of the postcard.

Now all the 40 cent items cost $2, and have $3 shipping. Or you can buy the same thing on Amazon for $6. Their search also used to be a lot better, today it's worse than Youtube search.

We have a very large Amazon warehouse/center in town, and during my last prime trial I received maybe 5/25 items listed under “2 day shipping” in actually 2 days. Nearly all took 4 or more.

Cannot even imagine 1 day.

Aliexpress used to ship almost exclusively from China, so your package took 4-6 weeks in a best case scenario.

The value prop of Amazon is (was?) getting your item fast (not cheapest anymore and certainly not highest quality).

AliExpress rarely takes longer than 2 weeks from china these days, and I’ve had AE ship from china and beat Amazon sending domestically before.

Amazon used to be the cheapest and fastest with the best customer support. They have slipped backwards on all those fronts.

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