On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 5:45 PM William Park via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
There's always something cheap to pad your order with. It might take you hours to pick. Beware: most things are not "Choice".
I tried that, when I was shopping for Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. AliExpress had it for around $25. When I went to pay, they say "They detected suspicious network activity", and asked me to slide a slider. So, I did, and the price jumped to around $47. I ended up buying from Amazon at a cheaper price.
Wow, that has never happened to me, and I've shopped at Ali for almost a decade from multiple locations over two continents. It's my dollar store for cables, adapters, small utensils and recently Labubus(*). I've never needed the slider (which appears to me to simply be the Chinese approach to doing CAPTCHA) but wouldn't consider that a major impediment. They have to deal with both scam sellers and scam buyers so I imagine they have certain grey-lists at play. My only guess is that the discount to $25 is a lure for first-time or prospective buyers. Temu does this too. I sometimes see stupid low prices before logging in but I ignore them. FWIW, shopping around on the site a little, my lowest price on a RPi0 2W is CAD$38.58 which includes fast-ish (about two weeks) shipping and no HST. - Evan (*) True story. At the height of the craze my granddaughter was massively annoying her family for one. I saw one at Ali really cheap; I was pretty sure it was a fake but what the heck. Turns out it was legit. Meanwhile, another relative thought he'd score some quick cash by buying and flipping a bunch, but the shipment he thought was legit was all fake.