[ar0]

And what's worrysome for Amazon is that in this case it is just a small step to go a bit further: If you don't care too much whether the item is junk, you can just buy it on AliExpress. Most likely it will be cheaper than Amazon and at least you know that you have opted for the "cheap and often junk" route.

[Coding_Cat]

In my experience, AliExpress is usually better than expected. Unless you go for the absolute cheapest the general quality is actually very high.

I bought some socks for example: for the price of cheap socks in a brick-and-mortar store I got some of the best socks I have ever owned.

I think AliExpress could do some really good bussiness if they were to add a QA person in the loop and would start selling 'premium' products under a different name. So far the median price/quality ratio of the things I bought has been very good (with a few duds, all gimicky electronic crap).

[phonon]

> for the price of cheap socks in a brick-and-mortar store I got some of the best socks I have ever owned.

Link? :-)

[woolvalley]

They do, it's called Tmall: http://www.webretailer.com/lean-commerce/tmall-global/