Alibaba.com Alibabagroup.com Aliexpress.com alibaba-inc.com I ordered an item and it never arrived. However they pretended that it had and even gave me a date of delivery which was false.

On 3rd September, 2020 I ordered an item for my acupuncture clinic. It was a pair of 'glasses' which had walnut shells in place of glass and a mesh cage for burning moxa in. I must confess I had qualms about buying from a Chinese website due to previous bad experiences on Chinese sites. Unfortunately the item I wanted can only be sourced in China. At the end of September I received a message that the item had been delivered. Considering that I had been home all day for the whole week of the supposed delivery, I was rather surprised.

I checked the details of the order on their website and they had 'kindly' gone to the trouble of drawing up a little flow chart detailing dates of the supposed delivery. According to them, the glasses were posted about three weeks after purchase and arrived in Australia on around 27th September and then delivered to me on 29th September by AliBaba Express Standard. There were so many things wrong with this explanation. At the time of the supposed delivery I don't think that planes were flying from China to Australia due to coronavirus. If it had come by ship I doubt it would have arrived so quickly. And furthermore it is logistically impossible for an item to arrive in any country on earth by ship or plane and then be processed, pass through customs and then be delivered within two days.

Furthermore AliBaba Express does not operate in Australia. I assured them that I had not received the item but they assured me that it had arrived and probably been taken by my neighbours! Well my neighbours have failings but coming on to my balcony and stealing moxa glasses is not one of them. Anyway AliBaba is not called AliBaba for nothing. Remember the forty thieves? There was no way they were prepared to acknowledge that I had not received the item. However what is spectacularly duplicitous is the way they drew up a fake time line of delivery and stuck by it.