Hacker News Reader

Comment by IveSeenItAll | Hacker News Reader

Not much to say about the article itself ("cheap stuff from AliExpress-or-its-Amazon-representatives isn't great, news at 11"), but just in case the author happens to be following comments here: I'm pretty sure the first photo shows your name, address and email in small print at the top?

View on HN

It's actually the importer's info from the Chinese manufacturer, not the OP, since it's the switch packaging (it'd be inside the original package they'd have received from Aliexpress)

AliExpress shipping is wild.. as far as I understand it they try to find the cheapest place to send packages from, so (living in Europe) I've received packages from Australia and Azerbaijan. They probably send a palette of stuff to a country that has cheap International postage, and from there the palette of goods get broken down and packaged for the 1000s of end-consumers..

Yeah, I used to get stuff directly from China, then after the postage rate changes I was getting packages that had gone China -> Thailand -> Azerbaijan -> USA. Nowadays they seem to batch packages for the good shipping, from Aliexpress in China to (I assume) some US subsidiary, and then from there it gets parceled out to a shipping company seemingly at random (Maersk, Amazon, USPS).

So the US had the USPS stop subsidizing Chinese postage rates... and they innovated to leverage subsidies elsewhere.

Just stop subsidizing international shipping period seems the smart play. If they want to undercut their own high-end domestic competition and destroy foreign competitors then they can at least pay fair rates.

Which part of "send a giant box of stuff to the US using regular shipping channels and pay whatever duties and/or tariffs are due, sort it out into individual destinations once it gets there, and then deliver with USPS at regular domestic rates" involves this subsidy that you speak of?

You used to be able to get knickknacks on AliExpress (incl shipping) for less than the cost of a US domestic postage stamp. Nowadays it seems like free shipping has a higher minimum, and most of my items use unreliable gig economy services like uniuni for the last mile delivery

I regularly get addressed Aliexpress packages that contain multiple addressed packages (e.g. from the same order), so they may in fact be sending pallets full of packaged and addressed items to another country for re-packing and re-shipping

I once noticed that there were eBay auctions with free shipping closing with no bids, minimum 1 cent bid. I wrote a script and bid on 1000 random items, all from China, all Aliexpress style items. Every single one of them was shipped from Mongolia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com