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.