my advice is.......leave it alone. Not only are most of the sellers slack you will get hammered with unwanted emails from AliBaba

I have purchased from Alibaba approx 3 months ago. Extremely hard to communicate with the language barrier. Just make sure you ask thousands of questions and be sure of everything prior to buying. Keep all records communication aswell.

I've used Ali Express about half a dozen times with no problems at all, but I haven't used Ali Baba. Yes, you get emails from them as well but they give you similar/same items that are on special, so no real problems there.

I had an excellent experience dealing with a smaller company on aliexpress (buying wedding bombonnierres). They were a third of the cost for identical items here on ebay. Items arrived well boxed & arrived in about 3 weeks.

 

There is not too much of a language barrier if you persist (although their English can be a bit quaint) & if you ask for advice, I found some of the people in companies there were very helpful.

 

My advice though would be this: Investigate what it is you want to buy and if you are buying in order to resell here on ebay, make sure ebay isn't already flooded with the stuff. A lot of other small aussie sellers are already on this bandwagon.

We use aliexpress and the English and Chinese alibaba very regularly. My wife is Chinese so finds it easier to shop on Chinese alibaba for her stock. Much cheaper there. But you have to be able to read & write Chinese in order to use the site. We rarely have a problem. The downside to Chinese alibaba is that they don't usually ship overseas so we have had to setup s shipping account in Shanghai with a freight forwarder so they send our stuff their. Once we build up to about s 20kg box we have them ship. In order to pay for these services we have to send money to China as they only accept payment in CNY. Her sister to the rescue here.
Complicated but works well for us. We can get our stock at far more competitive prices to help offset the bad exchange rate. So that's our story.