TL;DR: I am from Eastern Europe, moved from shopping from Amazon USA to AliExpress and I saved a ton of money. The waiting times are significantly longer but Am

TL;DR: I am from Eastern Europe, moved from shopping from Amazon USA to AliExpress and I saved a ton of money. The waiting times are significantly longer but Amazon's were far from good anyway. --- Long version: I am in Eastern Europe and the markup we pay here for shopping from Amazon USA is crazy. Still, I needed some of the items because I couldn't find them anywhere else: high-quality iPad Pro cases, books at their 6th edition, USB flash sticks with physical protection switches etc. I always end up paying something between 40% to 55% above the combined price of all items in the cart. It's like I get it, delivery fees, EU VAT%, customs et. al. but I eventually got sick of it. I also made the mistake of paying for express shipping several times. It made but a small difference. The "express" time was 12-13 days and the normal one was 18-20. I easily pay $50 to $150 for the privilege to wait 2 weeks and not 3. Meh. Moved to AliExpress a year or so ago. You get the occasional hiccup where a middle party unexpectedly cancels shipping for reasons unknown but AliExpress has so far proved very capable and fair when addressing such problems. Recently passed the 100 orders mark and so far I've lost... $8 or so due to AliExpress not siding with me during 2 disputes. That's less than 1% of what I paid in total. It's a very acceptable risk margin. Do I wait a lot for my stuff? Sadly yes. Stuff travels to Netherlands and then makes a U-turn back to Eastern Europe and I rarely get something before the 4th week mark. And some of the cheaper things where free shipping is the default you might easily wait 6-10 weeks for... but I don't care. I get things that are both cheap and with very good quality. Nothing of what I ordered is life-saving so I am OK with the waiting. The amount and diversity of all sorts of stuff in AliExpress is crazy. I love it.