Keep in mind that a lot of your local marketplace sellers just order rebadged stuff from alibaba. I’ve found literally the same electronics i’ve bought locally on aliexpress for like half the price.

AliExpress is great if you have a 3D printer and you can’t stop messing with it.

I buy my body jewelry, earrings etc on AliExpress. Also buying Zirconia jewelry and gold plated works very well since there are hardly any premium charges. it’s also pretty much the only area of goods I’ve found where in 98,9% of the cases the product and materials used is exactly as advertised, meaning no oxidizing, radiation and magnet friendly, etc.

There are some nice stuff of Ali that was original intended for the Chinese market. But you have to know you get what you pay for in China. If it’s too cheap, it’s going to be crap.

I got a camping tent from aliexpress and it was pretty good. I have used it a couple times a year for about 4 years now. I think it’s called the lanshan or something like that.

I bought an Anbernic RG351P from Aliexpress as well. I have used it for countless hours playing retro games on it. Not quite nintendo quality, but definitely a lot better than other emulator consoles I’ve used.

I’ve also bought some great quality clothes from taobao. No reps only stuff like raw denim, hoodies, and styles that aren’t too popular in the US like high waisted pleated pants or heavy tees that are 11oz

I bought an electric field heater for my dynavap, so that’s good.

I buy Lego from Ali. It’s so much cheaper and the quality is same.

I’ve used aliexpress for bootleg lego and have had mixed results. Some sets were perfect copies with all pieces, and others were missing some. I was also able to get some discontinued sets which was nice. The quality of the pieces themselves were pretty good. It is a bit of a risk but hard to beat the price as its wayyyy cheaper.

Temu is just driving the social media impulse “buy buy buy you need it buy it now!!” Culture when in reality their stuff is crap, and even for the cheap prices… You probably weren’t going to buy it anyway. They are really striving in being a shitty company that’s bad for us and the planet.

Good video here that explains more of how they’re just manipulating us to buy more: https://youtu.be/7hGD5Cz_now

I got a decent little fanless i5-based computer with 6 ethernet ports to use as a router, and it was cheap and works well running OPNsense. That’s about the only thing I’ve bought on AliExpress.

I got a really good Glock 18 style electric water pistol off Aliexpress for this summer, at half the price they were being hawked for on Amazon. It even comes with a drum magazine- it was great for a music festival I went to recently!

I sometimes use AliExpress for DIY electronics like microcontrollers and other components. An Esp32 usually costs around 8-12 euros in Europe. On AliExpress I buy them for 3 (plus shipping). Its worth it if you are buying more than just a few. Shipping is usually slow but if its not urgent its cheap and so far of good/ decent quality.

I did also buy a small industrial camera on there which did not work. I contacted the seller and after some troubleshooting they agreed to ship a new camera to me (still waiting on that one) but in principle I am satisfied with the service for the price I payed.