I haven't purchased anything from aliexpress from about a year, and boy howdy, have they made the interface much more deliberately confusing.

The listed prices are often sale prices that I'm not qualified for, and are drastically different than the actual price. Items get lumped into these bundle deals and dollar express categories instead of just going into my shopping cart.

What an annoying mess.

@MLE_online And just wait until you actually order something and they ship it. The last-mile delivery now avoids USPS and goes via a sketchy gig-worker outfit called Uniuni. Sometimes they're great, and sometimes... not. I've heard stories of multiple missed deliveries, packages ending up in the wrong place, etc.

@emeb I ordered something last year, and one of those gig drivers showed up to drop it off. He somehow lost one of his other packages, and was panicking about it in my driveway. He and I were having to use his translator app because he thought I had somehow taken the wrong package. He was in my driveway for probably 15 minutes looking under other cars and in the bushes, and never did find the package.

Aliexpress isn't alone in this though. Walmart is doing it now, too. My neighbors constantly order stuff from walmart and it shows up delivered by a gig worker doing deliveries in some random passenger car