Shipping from China

I guess China has stopped the free shipping boost to its merchants selling good overseas and/or it is just part of the new Chinese approach of sticking it to wqesterners who don't kiss their arse.

I'm still seeing "free" or

What I usually see on Aliexpress (especially last time I looked since the effect of the virus kicked in) is "free" in the search results, then go to the item page and they want $20. Or go the item page and it says "doesn't ship to Australia", then add it to your cart and see $20.

Occasionally though, "free" in the search results does still carry through to the item page and into your cart, but as far as I can see the only way to tell is to try with every item until you find one. I suspect that it's free to the USA still (or maybe Russia - they seem get a lot of business from there), but not to us. The website just gets mixed up.

The code that runs that website is just as much Chinese junk as the sort of stuff they sell. There are good deals to be found there though, if they ever arrive.

No imagination - like here in Australia the cheaper international post services have probably been suspended. If you want to send something _to_ China it's more expensive than before the virus as well. "Flight cancellations and government restrictions" is Australia Post's excuse.

I ordered some things from Aliexpress in early-mid March, just before the service suspensions and price rises started. One arrived about a month and a bit later (the cheapest one, funnily enough, also least important), another about a week ago, and still waiting on the other (will have to order again elsewhere because even with my pessimism about postage times from China, I didn't allow for three months!).

Aliexpress also won't let you put in a claim for a refund if the tracking says the item has arrived in Australia (even if that was well over a month ago). I used an Australia Post pre-paid credit card and it has since expired and AP changed from Visa to Mastercard so I had to get a different one and probably can't get a refund back to it anyway.

Also ordered from an Alibaba seller at around the same time. They basically extorted me, upping the postage cost after I'd agreed to the one originally quoted for DHL. They're the only supplier though, so I went with their excuse that they had to use FedEx due to the virus - the parcel was sent using DHL anyway. That arrived in reasonable time though.

China has never provided free postage for items leaving China, AFAIK. It's just so cheap and efficient that many sellers include the cost of postage in with the cost of the item.

I got the Shenzhen manufacturers of one of my products (250g, about A5 size fat cardboard envelope) to find the cheapest available shipping. They spent a month looking, and for this package the best they could do was about $AU3.

There are many shipping companies. They provide vendors with big boxes, each labelled for a specific country. The entire contents of the box is emptied into the postal service at a port in that country. The cost to the vendor depends on the weight, so small envelopes (say with a couple of transistors, or some little trinket) cost very little, just a few cents. There is no individual handling until the recipient postal service has to sort and deliver the items.

Possibly there has been a slight increase in charges, maybe because the global system is clogged with stuff that is sitting for a week or three because it's been handled.

But the main thing I see that has changed (broken!) recently is that AliExpress changed its search function, so you can search and see hundreds of responses, but as soon as you hit "free shipping", or "sort by # of orders", or some other search customisation, most or all of the items disappear; even ones that were visible as "free shipping" in the initial results. This is incredibly frustrating, but the change happened before COVID19.

Another thing that changed at the same time is that you get many items that have no relationship to your search terms. Especially if you search and they have no matches; then you get hundreds of completely irrelevant results.

I wish AliExpress would fix their bloody search engine. It used to be excellent.

Clifford Heath.

I bought some 2.5GbE cards last week, and there were sellers either offering free postage for US$20 or $16 plus $4 postage.

AFAIK the government covered shipping costs for small items at least. They no longer do, hence it is passed on to buyers.