Aliexpress is basically amazon with longer shipping time in my experience. Each seller has their own store rating similar to ebay so as long as you exercise judgement ie. Dont buy from brand new stores with 0 feedback or things that are too good to be true and avoid certain things like batteries and storage media unless you know exactly what you’re buying you should be fine. I’ve bought a lot of stuff from there (mostly electronics) and haven’t had bad experiences

Amazon is only slightly better than AliExpress here, lots of bullshit recently, but at least they are faster. But if you look closer you often find the same stuff from AliExpress for more than three times the price there. So far I only had one or two issues with AliExpress, but as a rule I tend to not buy anything that goes on my body or food, has batteries in it or is worth more than 20 (very rarely more than 100 due to my countries custom rules) bucks with the exception of microelectronic components.

Etsy has been good for me if you look for actual local sellers or digital products - Only once has an issue there,that was clearly dropshipped. But most of the stuff I buy there is a digital download from some obscure graphic artist anyway. Nowadays I more and more tend to use Fiverr for that and get properly made to order graphics anyway.

Aliexpress surpassed amazon, change my mind

AliExpress screwed me recently. A vendor sent me the wrong items. I mean, they weren’t even the same kind of items. I disputed it with the vendor and they said they’d sent the right things, so there.

I opened a case with AliExpress. They asked me for a whole lot of information, some of which didn’t make any sense, along with some pictures. I sent them everything. They sided with the vendor.

Fortunately, I had paid with PayPal. PayPal looked over the information from both sides and promptly refunded my money.

I don’t expect to be doing business with AliExpress again any time soon.