There are few things more scammy than AliExpress “discounts”. I have yet to see a cent of the hundreds of dollars of “savings” they gave or advertised to me.

This is not correct. I do not have the app and get tracking for my orders.

Depends on the shipping company, and likely on your location. I get tracking numbers for most but not all shipments

"random apps" and it's the largest eCommerce company on the planet

When I did customer tech support for a major retailer, we had confused customers calling all the time because they would randomly get price-match refunds they never asked for. They were installing apps that were automatically requesting the refunds by searching their emails for orders and checking the prices on the websites. These people had no idea they had even given these apps permission to read their emails.

You'd be surprised on what general public can go to save $5.

eBay keeps pushing their app with a $5 discount, advertised using a focus-stealing popup interrupting your attempt to give them money, so some people must be taking the bait.

>You get 'coins' for a daily check-in, which are automatically(?) applied as a discount.

This should be illegal

That's definitely a feasible explanation (and the one I would assume to be true for AliExpress).

But there is another, slightly less evil, explanation that I know at least some companies have pushed their apps because of: the thinking is that if you're on their website, there is less friction to open a new tab and search for a lower price from their competitors, than if you're in their app. Obviously it's hardly any different - opening a new app (the web browser) vs. opening a new tab in the app you're already in - but the theory is that there's a slight psychological difference.

Of course I'm not saying that trying to prevent your customers from searching for better deals is a nice thing to do. Just adding that data mining isn't the only reason for some companies to want people to use their apps.

It also all goes to the party, who are the owners of Alibaba (and every other company in China).

Should you ever need someone in a foreign country to do something for you, it's good to have as much information as possible at your disposal about them.

This is the way. It's prudent to treat apps with skepticism, it's unfortunate it's come to this.

I study Apple's Privacy Nutrition Labels religiously every time I consider installing an app.

I like the ones with "Data Not Collected".

With Firefox, yes. I wouldn't fully trust other browsers to care about my privacy.

I think you need the app to use the delivery lockers (which I prefer over home delivery)

AFAIK, the app is just the website in a webview.

AliExpress won't allow me to open most pages in the account section on my iPhone. Instead I get a page telling me to install the app.

While browsing, there are also popups offering the app approximately every third link I click. Some of them are telling me to install the app.

Unless the situation has changed recently, it's not perfectly fine, it is unusable on purpose.

Both are web stores. Both have websites AND apps.

They are compared / contrasted. Nobody is saying one is concretely related to the other.

Likely the place where people are "willing to trade privacy for convenience", according to Baidu's CEO.

According to their profile: Norway

Not if the local reseller simply calls itself a marketplace and logistics company and the local regulator lets them get away with it.

Amazon, in my experience, does arbitrate disputes about returns and defects, but the important point is that from a legal perspective, I don't think they have to, so you're at their mercy.

You can't even be sure that VAT is handled correctly, which local retailers can usually not get around.

I see this kind of fakes on eBay or Amazon all the time. It's even harder to report it than on AliExpress and I never had an obvious report of fakes upheld (AND eBay warns they will forward your identity to the seller. Great thing if the organised crime is involved in this)

Case in point, fake 2TB Sandisk ExtremePro microSD:

- £17 on eBay: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/336728033240 - even the images prove it's a fake (also $570 on sandisk.com)

Agreed, there's more of that on AliExpress but Amazon is not free from that either.

Few years back, Amazon had a rampant "fake USB storage" problem too. Then, one day, all the fakes were gone, just like that.

Yeah it would be hard to hide. When I order from AliExpress it arrives via Chinese carriers I have never even hard of, and about half the time the final delivery is through a Chinese gig delivery company that must pay practically nothing to the driver because they will usually drive up in front of my house and chuck the package out the window onto my front lawn.

I've ordered things from AliExpress shipped from the local warehouses (2-3 days delivery) ; I've ordered things on Amazon UK that were fulfilled and shipped from Amazon UK that were delivered in 3-5 working days.

Not a £1 tat, and not one off. Not that AliExpress is my choice, no, far from it. Sometimes it's better, closer to the manufacturer, that's all.