Experiences with tea and/or teaware from AliExpress
Does anyone have a good experience with buying tea or teaware from AliExpress?
Any recommandations for shops on the site?
I had one order of cups go missing but they offered replace or refund. Replacements arrived fairly quickly. Nothing has arrived broken. I did have one order that I had to dispute since it never arrived and never even said it was shipped – couldn’t get the seller to respond. Ali Express handled the refund.
Hello Teatime is one I have ordered from often, both tea and teaware and I have been very pleased every time. Teaware multiple times from Shanshuijian Tea Shop with no problems. I have not purchased pu-er from Ali Express so I don’t know how reputable it is; you can probably find older threads on it by searching for Ali Express in Discussions.
I think Aliexpress has for some strange reason banned the sale of tea although I hear some sellers list it anyway. My favorite store on Aliexpress was King Tea who now has his own website, I am not sure what it is though.
Aliexpress was and for all I know may still be a Mecca for fake tea. There were many sellers who would falsely claim their tea was forty or fifty years old but the price was under $20. Real puerh tea that old will cost four to five figures in money.
Yeah, some sellers are still selling tea. Hello Teatime took down all their tea and opened an Ebay store but now they have some tea listed again. Maybe the decree was rescinded.
I’ve bought flavoured puerhs (rose and sticky rice) from aliexpress, but haven’t tried them yet. I’ve also tried a few interesting herbals (terrible) and black teas (actually, quite good). I’ve bought some teaware from sellers and have always received them unbroken. If you don’t receive them within 2 months, you can get a refund. Aliexpress will refund you even if the seller shipped the item because they guarantee the time frame.
Ali has cracked down on tea sellers at last and the vast majority of teas are gone. Looks like it’s for real this time.
Banning the selling of tea on Aliexpress was what you call a bad business decision. No other explanation.
Considering the better ones are just moving over onto ebay or even back to taobao it really makes no sense.
I would love to know their reasoning but it simply seems stupid to me. There were only a couple of sellers on their that I bought from and remember the name of, ,namely King Tea and Han Ecological Tea Company. King tea now has their own website don’t know where the other went.
They shut down the whole food category that tea was a part of. I suspect their international investors were afraid of lawsuits. Silly though. They did a lot of business with tea.
Han Xiang is selling from here at the moment.
http://www.dhgate.com/store/18272721#st-navigation-storehome
He doesn’t have everything he had listed in the Ali site yet but he is adding more on an irregular basis.
This store on dh3 seems to have an interesting collection but I haven’t bought from them yet.
http://www.dhgate.com/store/20486666#st-navigation-storehome.
The above has their own website ow with cheaper prices.
http://www.yunnancraft.com/en/
No berylleb King Tea on EBay is a different King Tea than the one that was on Aliexpress.
Oddly enough some stores are now back selling tea on Ali again.
This is strange since two different sellers told me that Ali had come down on them hard to stop and almost everyone (save a few stragglers) did de-list their tea. Yet a few days later some high-profile sellers are putting their tea stock back online again (like for example Grandness, a store I do NOT recommend, by the way). Not all sellers so far though, just a few. This is odd. Is Ali having a hard time making up their mind? Does anyone know what is actually going on?
While Aliexpress was the Mecca of fake puerh I would like to see them allow the sale of tea again. There were a couple of sellers on there I really liked. I don’t know if a lot of teaware is still sold on Aliexpress or whether these stores abandoned their teaware when they could no longer sell tea.
There are currently a lot of grayed out teaware items in my wishlists, so it does appear that many sellers simply dropped everything when they had to give up tea. Banning tea seems like a really bad move on the part of Ali.
Apparently this is happening. I inquired about this from the proprietor of China Grandness, since it’s such a big store, and she confirmed Ali closed all tea stores. She said all the sellers are “very angry”. No shit.
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