Regrettable experience buying from alixpress.com

[StillShaving]

Aliexpress payments go through their own middleman payment service, called Alipay. So, you are not paying the merchant directly, you are paying to Alipay. They are coding transactions from Paypal as a peer-to-peer transfer instead of a sale. As I understand it, this change was made just a few months ago.

You may be able to get the fee waved by Chase, but only as a "goodwill" gesture.

I do not mind them outsourcing through Alipay, but when I use my Paypal account tied to my credit card I have see both transactions.

There are also some sites which use Paypal for processing even when using a credit card (analogous to Alipay being used by Aliexpress). A few years I bought something from a small vendor in another country using their website and my CC directly. The vendor said they did not ship to my country and gave a refund which surprisingly came back to me as Paypal credit (minus some paypal fees). When I asked for a full credit back on my CC the merchant said that was all he could do, that he only saw it as paypal visa charge or something like that. Rather than accept the reduced paypal credit I contacted my Visa/Mastercard and got a full refund. I am not sure how his paypal service handled that, whether they tried to charge the small merchant for this otherwise canceled transaction.

 

[LJS]

Thanks for posting this. Looks like I have a number of $15 hits I will need to call and dispute myself. What a nuisance.

 

[Robert G]

Good info here. I just unlinked my Chase Visa from PayPal.

 

[Ed Gcom]

Alternative to exposing your payment numbers is available.

Most bank credit cards will give you a virtual card number so that you can use that number for an online purchase. This avoids using PayPal, your debit card or your bank account. The seller never gets any number it could used illegally. Even if the seller saves the number in its records and then gets hacked, you real numbers are safe.

i do this and feel very safe.

 

[Balthier]

I use a reloadable prepaid debit card so there's nothing to steal once I am done with the transaction.