anyone buy from alibaba?

I was looking for some dirt bikes for my kids. I wanted to pick up some decent japanese bikes but there is absolutely nothing locally. Just clapped out overpriced junk. So I started looking at the Chinese ones. We have a 50cc Chinese minibike that we got used and the kids thrashed it for 3 years. It is still in great shape except they ran it out of oil. So anyway I am not put off by the Chinese bikes. But when I started looking on line I wound up on alibaba where I can get a minimum order of 5 bikes for pocket change. More than I need but I would buy 5 identical bikes and sell a couple or keep them for parts. But that website is bewildering. How the hell do I do my due diligence? I know a lot of the bikes are sold here already but the manufacturers freely say they will sticker them with whatever name and model you want so it's difficult to get concrete feedback.

I buy pretty frequently on the sister site AliExpress. IIRC the difference is that Alibaba is B2B (business to business and multiple units) whereas AliExpress sells to the consumer, and in single units.

I looked at aliexpress but the prices are substantially higher and from what I gather you are buying from a vendor rather than the factory.

This is an interesting thread. I've never bought from alibaba. My primary exposure to their site was about a year ago when I was trying to buy a replacement water pump for an indoor fountain. Alibaba was the only online source I could find for the model pump I was looking for. Unfortunately, the minimum order was something like ten thousand units. I gave up on fixing my fountain... :(

I did three years ago when I was a steel rep. The whole process was aweful. They didn't meet the delivery deadline and the product was no where near specification. Think 18 GA hot roll instead of the 12 GA cold roll we paid for. This was a 6-figure order, too...

Not Datsun1500. That better? wrote:

bearmtnmartin wrote: I looked at aliexpress but the prices are substantially higher and from what I gather you are buying from a vendor rather than the factory.

The prices are higher because you are buying from someone that went through all of the steps to become a business, buy multiple units, sit on inventory, pay fees, etc. If you buy 5 direct will you sell them for what Alibaba sells them for or will you mark them up to cover your expenses and time?

They are for me. Not going into the Chinese dirt bike business. If I want to buy from an established business I would deal with someone over here. If you spend some time on alibaba you will see that there are a lot of manufacturers trying to move big volumes by the container load. That's the whole premise. Some factories though will allow you to buy a small number as a first time order hoping to move the whole container next time. There are also vendors or resellers who will sell small volumes but of course they take their piece of the pie so are more money.