Online Shopping… in China
Amazon and eBay have competition. AliExpress.com
You can buy almost anything from this Chinese website. Cheap. I mean, sometimes the prices are half or less. They have lots of obscure things.
I’ve ordered a dozen times. 80% of the time what you get is great. 20% of the time it doesn’t arrive or is junk. But it is always an exciting experience.
What’s most surprising is that most of the items come with free shipping to the United States!
I think as the world globalizes we will see new things like this one, where you are actually shopping online, from a store in another country, with goods made and shipped from another country. The US is entirely bypassed in the entire chain.
Anyway, AliExpress is a fun site to visit and shop at.
But let me give you a warning in advance: The dispute resolution process is completely defective. You cannot win a dispute, ever. You will get nowhere by filing a dispute, even one for an item that was never delivered. They make a lot of representations on their website, but as far as I can tell, they are false (by American standards.)
Nevertheless, I think this is a view into the future, where globalization can just bypass middlemen all the way up the supply chain.
What will we do when American companies are all using cloud-based PBX systems located in China? What is your strategy?