[jsjddbbwj]

If you buy any health product, makeup, etc from AliExpress we should call this natural selection. Only half joking.

I don't want to see AliExpress closed down just because some girl decided it was a good idea to buy lipstick there at an unbelievably low price.

[friendly_fren]

People are downvoting this but it is true. Consumers have the responsibility to pay attention to where their goods come from. If you are buying something directly from China for an extremely cheap price, you shouldn't expect it to be genuine (not fake) or safe for bodily contact.

[dfxm12]

What if it is a counterfeit not coming directly from China? You can still be duped when the seller is stealing the pricing, ads and marketing materials of the genuine product.

Each product listing seemed legitimate, with some prices that compared to retail stores and official-looking advertisements.

This is what we're talking about here, not the marketing obvious knockoffs with comically misspelled brand names. Even the article talks about only authenticating the products after they were purchased and received.

[FireBeyond]

And if it comes from an Amazon seller that lists their location as California, but all of their stuff comes from China?

[MichaelApproved]

Who is asking for AliExpress to close down?

You think they have to sell products containing 700+ times the safe lead level to stay open?

Im fine with platforms but there have to be criminal penalties for selling harmful products. Start throwing people in jail.

[matthewowen]

i don't understand how you can hold these two beliefs at once.

if you believe that it is fundamentally unsafe to buy health products and makeup from aliexpress, then isn't it also reasonable to believe that aliexpress shouldn't sell it? there's a "people should be free to make bad decisions" counterargument, but as a society we've decided against that: it's the reason we have consumer protection laws.

put another way: if you made marketplaces accountable for selling dangerous items like this, you would push them out of the segments that are most dangerous.

[jsjddbbwj]

Having AliExpress check the safety of all of their products would increase the price of all of them substantially. That would me bad for me.

To make matters worse, the kind of girl who buys lipstick on AliExpress doesn't buy cheap Z80 clones or radios there, so she wouldn't come back to that site again once they take the lipstick down; only informed buyers would suffer the consequences. How's that fair?