Quote from: hairysun on January 12, 2018, 04:34:22 PM

Simple question ..... has anyone ordered video cards from places like Alibaba.com.
Perhaps another Chinese option/website ..... looking for reliable here.

Got to post and go back to work .... will catch up later today.
Thanks for any/all replies.

I've purchased a fair bit off Alibaba, the biggest thing when doing a transaction there is make sure always to use T/T, so you're covered if they don't send something or they send something different than what you're expecting.

From my experience, 90% of the places on Alibaba (that I've dealt with) are lying about what they have and what they do. They all have photos of some 'factory' and other places that there seems to be no real connection with - the reality is you're dealing with some reseller, and how good a deal is really just how many steps removed they are from the real factory.

There's no such thing as warranty with any of them - only if you've dealt with them repeatedly do you have a chance they'll do anything to make things right if something is wrong post-delivery. Consider that when you're buying in bulk from them, you might as well be the manufacturer. When things arrive broken, unless it's a bunch I just consider it a write-off.

I would say about 20% of the time (especially with new vendors) they'll send you something different than what the pictures show. Sometimes it's a newer version, sometimes it's a different version - sometimes it's not even remotely the same. Mostly it has to do with them reselling stuff they know almost nothing about - for instance, I was working with someone about those Colorful 8 GPU motherboards (no riser kind) and they couldn't get the quantity I wanted for whatever reason so they kept trying to pawn off some other normal ATX motherboard on me. I also bought some of the Colorful's from ANOTHER vendor that had the latest version in their pictures/description/model number, but sent me the previous version - which was a different form factor and everything.

I would say in 100% of my transactions they all lie about shipping timing - it's bizarre, something that would never happen in the US. If it's something smaller they'll actually print the DHL labels so the tag numbers are in the system, but they won't actually package/deliver the item - them a week later they'll 'discover' this mixup, that they always claim is on the shippers side, and then the thing really ships. For larger orders you're shipping via container, they'll just use the excuse that Chinese customs is doing this or that, and it's slowing things down - but believe me, it's not true, they just give wildly optimistic shipping times because they have no idea and when they actually have to source the parts and run into issues they then make up stories to cover it up.

I don't say any of this to say it's bad to do business over there or that you shouldn't - on the contrary, once you get used to the way things are done over there it's pretty straight-forward, as they all do the same things. Also keep in mind that you're going to be paying duties when you import things - so what we've found is that at the end of the day ordering stuff from over there doesn't turn out to be THAT much cheaper than getting it from here, especially when it comes to electronics and similar things. Where China really shines (cost-wise) is when you have them perform some task that might take time - for instance, if you bought pre-built rigs from them, that's going to be way cheaper because their hourly rate is much cheaper, so even though they're paying just a bit less for the hardware, because they pay radically less to assemble it all into a full rig you get decent savings.

Anyway, hope that helps!