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Sino e-tail is a mess right now

Buying cheap tat from China via the internet has always been a great way to accumulate ewaste.

The fact that you can buy a small gadget for $1 and that it will be shipped thousands of miles for free has made Chinese e-tail a powerful force. I suspect there are very few people in the Western world who haven't bought something from Bangood, AliExpress, Temu or similar websites.

Now that the USA and China have engaged in a tariff-war, things seem to have gone to hell in a handbasket though.

The latest news is that both CHina and the USA have stepped back from the unrealistic uber-high tariff rates that recently came into effect and, as of today, the US is imposing just a 30 percent tariff on imports from China while that country has wound down its tariffs to just 10 percent.

However, it's not the tariffs that seem to be messing things up right now.

The real problem, and it's one that is affecting all countries, is the issue of freight charges.

While you can still find the occasional "free shipping" items on sites such as AliExpress, the reality is that some "cheap" items now carry outrageous freight charges that are sometimes many multiples of the actual cost of the product itself.

Here's a great example of that situation. This cheap drone has a listed price of just $32.20 and that seems cheap; until you check how much the shipping costs. Yep, the price of shipping is $192.90, more than five times the cost of the drone itself. When you get to the checkout you'll also be whacked with another 15 percent for GST so the *actual* cost is now around $260 and that is massively overpriced for this cheap piece of tat.

But wait... it gets worse.

If you thought paying five times as much in freight as the product costs is outrageous, check this drone out.

This time we're talking about an item price of $37.69 for another cheap drone but just take a gander at the shipping cost on this baby.

FFS! They want $632 to ship it.

Do the sums and you'll actually have to ante-up an eye-watering $770 for what is still a "toy grade" drone that, once you read the specs, has no camera gimbal and barely manages to record HD footage.

As someone who regularly trawls these Sino e-tail sites looking for a bargain, I've noticed that shipping charges are starting to become a significant (if not massive) part of the total costs involved in such purchases.

Even where there appear to be bargains still available, I can't help but get the feeling that many of these may be just scams. Take this bit of industrial gear for example. How the hell can that be just NZ$2,300 including shipping?

If it costs $600 to ship a tiny plastic toy, the offer of shipping several hundred Kgs of heavy-lift equipment for free sounds just a little too good to be true... right?

I've also heard from a number of friends around the world that the levels of service from these Sino e-tailers is dropping precipitously. Slow shipping, non-shipping and shipping the wrong product all seem to be growing issues across a range of such sites. Even when complaints are made, the only response is often the offer of a "partial refund" that doesn't even come close to addressing the losses incurred.

Who knows... this may herald a renaissance of local retail, if only because, despite the premium being paid, at least you are going to get what you expect when you order.

I'll be keeping an eye on the situation and will update readers if/when things change for the better or worse.

Carpe Diem folks!

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