Hi everyone.
I am having an issue with an item worth £11 that I purchased from Aliexpress.
Long story in short, I received the wrong item, which was a soft toy instead of the plastic bottles that I paid for. So contacted the seller in China and Aliexpress but the automatic chatbot refused to issue a refund as whatever it was delivered to my address so filed a dispute against this via PayPal. But the issue is They decided that I need to return my item to Aliexpress in Germany to get a full refund which is £11. But returning this stupid soft toy with an option of tracking is more expensive.
Please advise if I just have to move on and forget about this money.
Thank you in advance!
I am having an issue with an item worth £11 that I purchased from Aliexpress.
Long story in short, I received the wrong item, which was a soft toy instead of the plastic bottles that I paid for. So contacted the seller in China and Aliexpress but the automatic chatbot refused to issue a refund as whatever it was delivered to my address so filed a dispute against this via PayPal. But the issue is They decided that I need to return my item to Aliexpress in Germany to get a full refund which is £11. But returning this stupid soft toy with an option of tracking is more expensive.
Please advise if I just have to move on and forget about this money.
Thank you in advance!
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12 Comments
sorted byneither will the seller;
and as the seller (and provider of the hilarious PayPal Buyer Pootection) is not based in UK it will be difficult to enforce otherwise supportive local consumer regs on foreign organisations.
PayPal Buyer Pootection will be a dead loss in this situation,
so abandon it and consider chargeback - assuming you paid via a card rather than PP balance.
Your card issuer may, but not necessarily will, refund without need to send anything anywhere,
whilst coincidentally causing the seller to be hit with the PP 14 GBP chargeback fee.
But first consider presenting the chargeback concept to the seller, repetitively mentioning the 14 GBP that will be auto-collected by PP,
as only a very arrogant and/or ignorant seller will want to be exposed to the cb fee that the seller cannot recover elsewhere - just the mention of a cb intention & the associated obligatory fee may prompt a favourable response.
Seller kept asking me to confirm delivery/ receipt on AliExpress account. And then generate a FREE return label. But There were no options in my account to do that. Stupid seller just would not understand the issue and kept sending me a link for return which just doesn't work.. have sent numerous messages.
In the end reported the issue to pp. After a month it was decided in my favour. PP issued a refund to me.
As far as the seller is concerned my dispute is still at the same stage.
Cannot talk to anyone at AE which makes any sense....
Most of the time they don't understand what you are asking...
Glad it was a small amount in my case.
I am still sending messages to the seller just to keep annoying them... (edited)
For the live chat on Ali, it is possible to get through to someone. The way I found works is selecting random options or deliberately being unclear, so you get the agent prompt. Good luck.
A year or two ago, I bought a bundle of glass screen protectors, which arrived broken - the seller gave me a tiny partial refund - I complained on Live Chat and they kept telling me they'd resolve it and email back and never did.
More recently I received "OFC Cable" (oxygen free copper) which had barely any reviews (though the seller was well-rated). After it arrived there were review complaints saying the seller was mis-selling the item and it was actually cheaper CCA (copper coated aluminium) cable.
Went on their Live Chat, sent photos, a video of me "scraping" the cable to show the aluminium, sent screenshots of the offending parts of the listing saying the listing was misleading and screenshots of the negative reviews. Got the runaround with that and in that case I was about £35 down.
Once again, I got precisely nowhere (Aliexpress again promising they'd get back in touch with me and come to a decision). The last I heard from Aliexpress' "customer service" was an email telling me to get in touch with the seller, which was funny because the seller was ignoring every message I sent - Aliexpress knew about this already! (edited)