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I was trawling aliexpress for solar chargers that have a high PV voltage rating and found this. Where do you start. min order 15 tons. Sure, because tons is the quantity you order a power supply in. 100% natural bamboo finger. Well ok. That's nice, but ... power supply? I guess charcoal is what you are left with after you plug it in? Very useful for a bbq.
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I've made 24 transactions on Alibaba as of the current time (pretty much all for GS inverters), totaling multiple thousands of dollars. Haven't had any outright issues--but then again, I guess I've mostly ended up with actual manufacturers, not dodgy resellers ("trading company").
Closest I came to trouble was on the (almost) latest order, where I was trying to get custom busbars made for the 12kw prototype. There were several red flags I noticed right off the top...like 1 transaction, 0 dollars, 15% on-time delivery rate. I figured that might be due to one bad order....so I pressed on and contacted them. Their price was a bit high, they were a bit slow to respond (not necessarily problems)...BUT in the end they gave me a 1-month lead time on the order. Said duration was buried in the fine print, and never discussed in the conversation. So I questioned them on it--and then got the response "may not be able before the holiday." Told them that if they couldn't do it before the holiday, I'd have to look elsewhere--eliciting an "ok" and it was over.
I did look elsewhere...and after finding another supplier with THOUSANDS of transactions and a more typical 96% on-time delivery rate...let's just say I got a better price, they shipped in 2 days after we got the design communicated to them, and are currently en-route to Sean with the 12kw inverter.
I will note that suppliers will sometimes try to evade an Aliexpress Trade Assurance order--but I've always been able to convince them to make a Trade Assurance order. And then after carefully reading the order, I have them amend the order if the shipping terms are incorrect (for example, they're shipping it to my address, but they put EXW terms in the order. I haggle until they at least put DAP or DDP in the terms.) I don't pay the order until it's right.
Fun part for me is when I have an Alibaba supplier ship stuff to Power Jack's factory, and then THEY either use it in GS stuff or include it in a shipment to Sean. Boy, that sure takes a lot of trust...
...I've done it several times, nothing's ever gone missing 🤣