Hand Tools Archive
David Weaver
A couple of weeks ago, I was showing links to chinese tools (the $60 butt chisels that WC sells for $16 and so on).
When I was at the beach two weeks ago, I got a notification that I'd qualified for transaction insurance for an $1800 transaction. Not knowing why I'd get that, I logged into my alibaba account (which you have if you use any of jack ma's products - I've bought through ali express), and noticed an order for 20 CBN wheels and 20 of something else.
Of course, I never created this order. The wheels were $60 each FOB, and probably the same thing as the "$150" wheel that I already have, but I thought that was a bit presumptuous. It appears that the sellers can create an order, fill it and then dispute with you about payment later since it is an assumed corporate action. I wonder if the seller had used some kind of service and found that I linked their account. Whatever the case, I could cancel the transaction before it was filled, but it was annoying that if I hadn't checked, it would've just been sent here and then I'd have needed to use the alibaba dispute process (they have my credit card info in ali express).
The only thing I could do to prevent it from occurring again was cancel my account on both, which I think is also annoying because I do buy individual goods from ali express (the $10 HSS irons that I have are from china, and I buy little divey things for my daughter, as well as guitar components, like celluloid binding that's really a $2 product in the US with $10 of shipping).
I thought for a second that it might be a nice gesture to just let the order come through and then sell a gaggle of $90 CBN wheels to cover selling expenses, etc, but decided not to.