Alibaba, AliExpress, DHGate, Wish, Taobao, Temu & more! - CHEAP CHINK SHIT GENERAL THREAD

I have to admit, I buy stuff from Aliexpress all the time. Except I'm leery of shipping costs to the bottom of the world so I only look at free shipping items. Also I'm cheap, so I end up listing from cheapest and then just getting a bunch of little fidgets etc and stocking suffers. I usually pay around 1-50 cents for items and have not been disappointed yet!
I've gotten some pretty cute things too, some Harry Potter beads, solar string lights etc...
I did get tempted with a robot vacuum that cost $11. It was nearly worth it for the entertainment it provided. It was immediately dubbed 'The Sucky Retard' and very effectively cleaned a area about 10cm square. It bounced off walls, table legs and apparently also specks of dust, rays of light, and loud noises...
 
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Sewing supplies (needles, pins, marking tools, etc) most have been exactly the same quality that you pick up in a craft or fabric store unless said fabric store or tailors' supply is really upmarket. I've had good luck getting fabric there as well since
1) almost everything that isn't seriously high end is being manufactured there anyhow (same with sewing supplies mentioned earlier) and
2) I read the descriptions/measurement/fiber content really, really carefully and already have a good working knowledge of textiles.

If you want specific brand-name goods, I'd say that it pays to shell out for that stuff and buy locally when possible. Anything that's fairly cheap, replaceable and is manufactured overseas anyhow is worth trying. If you look carefully at day-to-day stuff in stores here and you'll discover that it's actually manufactured somewhere in Asia anyhow (with a few worthy exceptions). Temu has a good track record and the fastest shipping in my experience.
 
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I decided to give Temu a chance recently and discovered their free item invite scams.

I've gotten so much free shit by making new fake accounts using old smart devices I either have laying around or friends/family have.
 
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I buy all kinds of things from AliExpress, and have for years!

I've found both a King Koopa (from the Mario cartoon) and Elephant Mario (from SMB Wonder) plush toys on AliExpress and both were in the $12 range. I wasn't expecting anything great because I know it's a bootleg but both toys were surprisingly well made! Nintendo isn't merchandising these characters so it's up to the bootleggers to take free reign in the market.

I also buy tons and tons of lapel pins for my pin boards. There is absolutely zero regard for copyright so they have pins of literally everything you can imagine and the pins are in the $1-3 range each. Twenty bucks usually gets me around 10 pins so I splurge every once in a while.

I found a fucking McDonald's logo flag the same size as a standard American flag for like ten bucks. I don't know what to do with it yet but it's hilarious and I am happy with the purchase.

There are tons of bootleg NES cartridges on AliExpress but there are also romhacks and translation hacks in cartridge form too if you look hard enough. I don't mess with the bootlegs of real games but every once in a while I'll buy a few romhacks and stuff just to mess around with.
 
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HedgehogBoysVEVO said:
I also buy tons and tons of lapel pins for my pin boards. There is absolutely zero regard for copyright so they have pins of literally everything you can imagine and the pins are in the $1-3 range each. Twenty bucks usually gets me around 10 pins so I splurge every once in a while
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You get what you pay for with those things. I bought a couple dozen for Christmas presents to my nieces, and I'll honestly be surprised if any of those pins are still in one piece by next Christmas. The soldering, metal and enamelling were the pinnacle of Chinesium and felt like they'd crumble even with nothing but the gentle caress of time. They're fine for cheap stocking fillers, but I certainly wouldn't call them collectable.
 
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I have been buying some boxes of colour markers recently from AliExpress and they are good enough to doodle here and there. They are from a different brand every time I see them on sale tho

The downsides that I have found is that they do not last long and sometimes the nibs are uneven, but they are way cheaper than a set of Copics or AD branded ones that is not even funny: a box of 100 chinesium markers cost a little more than a single AD Marker here. That is just a little over $200 mexican pesos (or about $18 burgerdollars). Of course I will use the cheap ones every time I want to draw something

I am also looking for a Prismacolor replacement, I have seen good reviews for the Arteza brand, but I also want a cheaper alternative because everything art related skyrocketed since COVID here in tacoland
 
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Doppelmonger said:
I am also looking for a Prismacolor replacement, I have seen good reviews for the Arteza brand, but I also want a cheaper alternative because everything art related skyrocketed since COVID here in tacoland
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I really enjoy my Black Widows, but I don't know how suitable they are for artists. Also, sometimes they have a very nasty habit of arriving with the leads shattered, but there are methods of repairing them.
 
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glass_houses said:
You get what you pay for with those things. I bought a couple dozen for Christmas presents to my nieces, and I'll honestly be surprised if any of those pins are still in one piece by next Christmas. The soldering, metal and enamelling were the pinnacle of Chinesium and felt like they'd crumble even with nothing but the gentle caress of time. They're fine for cheap stocking fillers, but I certainly wouldn't call them collectable.
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I agree that the quality and craftsmanship of a few of the pins I have is suspect but I'm not wearing them around so hopefully they last. I'm just putting them on a corkboard to look at, but I could definitely see some of them not lasting if I put them on a book bag or something that was being used all the time.
 
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Harbinger of Kali Yuga said:
It's almost all you-get-what-you-pay for. There are few true bargains on these sites. If you think you're getting a bargain, you'll discover otherwise soon enough.
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This is true for items where quality control is crucial. For example, if you decide to buy a cheap flash drive, you're probably throwing away both your money and whatever data you decide to store on it.

As an anecdote, a friend made the dumb decision to order a deep-cycle battery for his solar panels on AliExpress. It arrived defective, so the seller refunded part of the price to get it repaired locally. After doing that, it lasted for less than half a year before giving up the ghost for good.

But there are also plenty of goods (miscellaneous low-value items, generally) on which you can get a good deal. If buying locally, you'd be paying twice or thrice as much for the same product (possibly made in the same factory).

As an aside, product reviews on Temu are pretty wild. On AliExpress they're fairly useless, since most of them are like "the product arrived, haven't tested it yet. Five stars!" But at least they seem to be reviews by real people, mostly. On Temu, though, they don't even try to keep up the pretense of reviews being genuine. You get actual shit like this:

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I want to buy standard size incandescent light bulbs. Does anyone know of any shady Chinese websites selling them? I've already tried searching, but have yet to find what I'm looking for.
 
Here to Gawk said:
I want to buy standard size incandescent light bulbs. Does anyone know of any shady Chinese websites selling them? I've already tried searching, but have yet to find what I'm looking for.
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I'd honestly reconsider buying bulbs direct from China. Even if the product is good, the postage system there is incredibly brutal on items, and many Chinese retailers give no fucks about appropriate packaging.
 
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I buy Temu miniature dollhouse kits and I love them for the cost and the charm of building everything yourself. Meanwhile, Rolife feels like cheating, they look easier to assemble.

I did buy a printed cross stitch kit (printed meaning the color key thing is on the fabric) and when I finally set aside a day to do it, I OPENED THE PACKAGE AND THE FABRIC WAS A DIFFERENT DESIGN. It was so cute too, it was a bee, but I got a bear of some sort. My options on Temu are “we will refund you” but I don’t WANT a fucking refund, I want to send this bear back and get my fucking bee. I bought that kit for a reason! I liked it!
 
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Humbert Humbert said:
I buy Temu miniature dollhouse kits and I love them for the cost and the charm of building everything yourself
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Are these the little bookshelf ones? I've been wanting to see one actually put together by a normal person.
 
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