Yes! Alibaba is a trustworthy source for business owners and entrepreneurs looking to expand their business. It’s important for e-commerce customers to verify the reputation of merchants before doing business with them in order to protect themselves from scams, or other potentially dangerous situations.
Alibaba is a great place to source products for your online store, but make sure that you do the necessary research and find out which suppliers might be best for your project. Unlike eBay, Alibaba has many suppliers and it can be overwhelming to choose the right ones for your business demands because one could easily run into scammers or fall victim to black hat tactics. So, When choosing products via Alibaba, we recommend evaluating the seller’s ID as well as the company. In this article, we have a deeper look at whether Alibaba is safe and legit. Let’s roll!
Is Alibaba Safe And Legit?
Yes! Alibaba is a trustworthy source for business owners and entrepreneurs looking to expand their business. It’s important for e-commerce customers to verify the reputation of merchants before doing business with them in order to protect themselves from scams or other potentially dangerous situations. Alibaba is not responsible for the outcome of any transactions that occur from its platform; however, the company does work hard to ban or block merchants and buyers who are found using the service inappropriately.
Customers should work with a verified third-party escrow service when completing high-value transactions on Alibaba in order to ensure that both parties complete their end of the deal without fraud, abuse, or undue harassment.
When you take a look at suppliers on an Alibaba site, it is best to consider a number of factors: previous customer comments, the company’s number of transactions, feedback ratings and assessments and so on. This will give you an idea of whether or not the supplier with whom you are considering working can be trusted. When ordering samples it is always the safest measure to request a piece to test their quality and skill level. The safest payment methods – which are completely trustworthy – are Escrow, PayPal (also known as Webmoney), QIWI, Credit Card and local bank transfers.
Alibaba doesn’t officially support PayPal, but you can make arrangements to use it in a certain way if you’re dealing with an individual supplier. Going with the “goods and services” option can help get you under PayPal’s buyer protection, which is very safe if anything were to go wrong. However, as Alibaba only supports certain payment methods, it’s safer to use one of those in case of any mishap or issues.
How to Verify Suppliers to Safe Buy from Alibaba
Alibaba is very crowded. The marketplace is not only filled with great businesses and honest sellers, but also with scammers and frauds. Alibaba has taken the efforts to rid their platform of scams, but due to the nature of how business works on such a large scale in a marketplace like Alibaba, it’s still possible that you could run into some scams. Needless to say, no one should fall for these scams whether knowingly or unknowingly looking to buy from fake suppliers through Alibaba. There are ways of identifying and verifying which suppliers are real and which ones are not .
Alibaba Verification
When you look into the verification of supplier on Alibaba, you can see some business has been verified and others haven’t. Why is that? The thing with this platform here is that although they have a verification method in place for all the suppliers on the platform, the seller reviews are rather subjective so not many people are usually taking their recommendations seriously.
Another problem with Alibaba’s verification system would be counterfeit products which one might come across while making purchases online. This results in bad feedback – especially when a buyer spends thousands of dollars and finds out they’ve got fakes in their possession. If you look into ways to make sure you have a safe purchase via Alibaba, one alternative could be working with wholesale suppliers who have been vetted by other channels first before allowing them on Alibaba at all so as to guarantee quality products.
We suggest you do business with gold suppliers because they often have been in business for a long time and are considered more reliable than others. There is verification on all their listings on Alibaba. As you can see, there is a difference in the level of verification depending on a supplier’s history and the extent of checks that are carried out, so it’s important to choose suppliers who have been verified at a higher level.
Ask Questions
You should always be careful to make sure that suppliers are indeed who they say they are. Use Google to search for information about them and look for anything suspicious like multiple links to the same website and read between the lines to try and figure out if the information is consistent throughout. The most obvious places where fraud and scams can hide is written into contracts, so it’s best to make sure you’re aware of all of your rights by keeping a close eye on what you’re signing and also coming up with any red flags that might stand out as unusual before placing your signature.
Check Samples
Don’t assume that there are only scams out there on the Internet. Sometimes, even reputable suppliers and reputed manufacturers might not be as genuine as they seem to be. When looking forward to purchase an item, ask the publisher for some samples of it. You can also follow up with multiple sources who provide similar products and see which one suits you best or is a good fit for your budget.
Secure Payment Methods for Alibaba
If you don’t want to take risks when dealing with a potential Alibaba partner or supplier, then there are several payment options available on the platform that will help protect you in case they fail to deliver satisfactory results. The first is the Trade Assurance program which guarantees that your money will be returned in the instance where the items aren’t shipped or are unsatisfactory upon receipt. However, not all suppliers support this option so it’s important to choose partners carefully before doing business with them and ensure that they have public verification of their company legitimacy by using Alibaba’s “Verified Company” search before committing yourself! Check out the two most effective payment options available on Alibaba.
Secure Payment (formerly Escrow)
You don’t have to worry about your payments with Alibaba. This method will keep a 50% deposit of your total transaction cost in escrow until you release the remaining funds to the supplier when you confirm that delivery was successful, quality was agreed upon and there’s nothing wrong with what you received! If the supplier provides low-quality or faulty products or fails to deliver any products at all, they’ll be more than happy to fight for your monetary rights. Alibaba will request for a strict investigation in order to determine if the seller is responsible for the faulty goods, and once it follows up on cases where sellers were deemed responsible, it would quickly refund the buyer. One of the reasons why this is one of Alibaba’s recommended payment methods is because they care about your safety!
PayPal
The best payment solution for suppliers is PayPal and formally, it’s not supported by Alibaba. Although not officially involved with AliExpress, some suppliers do accept PayPal payments outside of Alibaba and you can often ask them to do so. When you send money via PayPal “Goods and services” option, you come under PayPal’s buyer protection program which is very secure. If there are any problems with your order or ordered products then PayPal ensures that you get your money back as smoothly and quickly as possible.
Final Words
If you have been on the fence about buying content or services through Alibaba, we hope this article clears up any questions that you might have. As mentioned previously, it’s always great to do your own research and learn more before committing to a supplier.
References:
https://seller.alibaba.com/businessblogs/px001uhts-how-to-safely-buy-and-sell-on-alibabacom
https://ecommerce-platforms.com/articles/buying-from-alibaba
Last Updated on August 6, 2022 by Ana S. Sutterfield
Magalie D. is a Diploma holder in Public Administration & Management from McGill University of Canada. She shares management tips here in MGTBlog when she has nothing to do and gets some free time after working in a multinational company at Toronto.
