The AliExpress 11.11 sale is AliExpress's yearly Singles' Day event, a sale across its sellers. In 2025 the main sale ran from 11 to 19 November, with a warm-up beforehand. Is it worth waiting for? Sometimes. The discounts can be real, but the badge won't tell you which ones are. What tells you is the price you wrote down before the sale started, measured against the checkout total during it.
When does the AliExpress 11.11 sale run?
The dates move from year to year, so treat anything you read (including this) as history and confirm the current schedule on the 11.11 event page inside AliExpress itself. For 2025, AliExpress's US press release put the main sale at 11 to 19 November. Third-party calendars for 2026 already disagree with each other on when the warm-up starts, which is one more reason to go to the source.
The same release promised "up to 90% off select items". Read that as a ceiling for a handful of listings, not the typical discount.
Warm-up vs pay phase
In past years the event has had two parts. During the warm-up you can browse and add items to your cart, but according to guides that followed earlier sales, including Slickdeals' sale calendar, you can't place discounted orders yet. Then the pay phase opens, and you can order what's in your cart with the sale prices and coupons applied.
The warm-up looks like waiting time. It's more useful than that. You can't pay a sale price yet, so it's the calm moment to write down what your shortlist costs now, which is the baseline you'll need later.
It isn't a perfect baseline. If a price was nudged up before the warm-up, the warm-up won't show it. That's why the check below also compares other sellers.
How the discounts stack
An 11.11 price is often several discounts layered on each other: the seller's sale price, a store coupon, an AliExpress platform coupon and coins. Coupon guides commonly explain that store and platform coupons can stack because different parties fund them, the seller for one and AliExpress for the other. Guides disagree on the exact order the layers apply in, so don't plan around one. Slickdeals says you can "usually combine" platform-wide coupons, store coupons and product-specific ones, and that coins earned through the app's games can be turned into coupons.
"Usually" is doing a lot of work there. The rules most often quoted from AliExpress's help pages are one platform coupon per order, store coupons subject to each store's own rules, and nothing stacking when the programmes exclude each other. Some sellers also opt out of platform coupons. We couldn't verify the official wording (the rules page returned an error when we checked), so read the fine print on each coupon rather than assuming.
The practical upshot: a coupon that "doesn't work" at checkout often isn't a bug. It's competing for a slot something else already filled, or the listing doesn't qualify. How AliExpress coupons work goes through the slot logic, and how to use AliExpress coins covers what coins are actually worth.
Are 11.11 discounts real?
Some are, some aren't, and we found no one who has measured the split. There is no independent study of AliExpress 11.11 pricing that we could find: no consumer body we know of has tracked whether AliExpress sellers raise prices before the event. So we won't claim they do.
What does exist is evidence from a similar event elsewhere, and it's worth knowing as an analogy. The UK consumer group Which? tracks Black Friday prices at eight UK retailers (not AliExpress). In its 2023 study of 227 products, 60% of the "was" prices had been in place for less than half the year, and 14 deals quoted a "was" price the retailer hadn't charged at all in the previous 12 months. In 2024, 83% of 175 Black Friday deals were the same price or cheaper at some point in the six months either side.
None of that proves anything about AliExpress. It does show why "% off" is the wrong thing to measure during a big sale: the reference price is the easiest part to move. How the struck-through price on an AliExpress listing gets there, and the everyday checks for it, are in are AliExpress discounts real. Below is the 11.11 version: the same idea, timed around the two phases.
AliExpress 11.11 vs Black Friday
They're separate events. 11.11 is AliExpress's own sale across its sellers, with the coupon and coin mechanics above. AliExpress's own page on the subject frames 11.11 as a global event and Black Friday as the regional one run by local retailers. AliExpress also runs a Black Friday sale later in November, as Slickdeals' calendar shows.
We won't tell you one is cheaper, because we found no published data comparing them. Whichever event you buy in, the check below works the same way.
A price check for 11.11 (our method)
This is our own routine rather than anything AliExpress publishes. It uses the warm-up as your baseline and other sellers as your cross-check, so you don't need a price-tracking tool.
- During the warm-up, write down the delivered price of the exact variant. Select the colour, size or bundle you actually want first, then note item plus shipping for your country. How AliExpress free shipping works explains why "free" can vary by listing.
- Note the same figure for three or four other sellers. That spread is your going rate, and it covers the case where your listing's price had already crept up.
- Check the seller while you have time. Feedback percentage, followers, and what buyers say in recent reviews.
- In the pay phase, compare checkout totals. Apply your coupons and coins, then compare the final figure against what you wrote down. If the saving is small or nil, you've lost nothing by knowing.
If an item is well below the going rate for no clear reason, be more careful, not less. Why AliExpress is so cheap explains where the low prices come from.
Doing the seller and listing check faster
AliScore can't tell you whether an 11.11 price is genuine. That's the manual check above, and it doesn't track prices. Where it helps is step 3, which is the slowest part to do by hand across a shortlist.
On a product page it shows a 0–10 score with a verdict, built mostly from ratings, review sentiment and the seller's trust score (feedback percentage on a strict scale, plus followers). Listings with very few reviews get pulled down rather than rewarded. On search results, the same score appears as a badge on each product card, so you can drop the weak listings before you start writing prices down. It's a heuristic over public data, not a promise, so still read the recent reviews. The formula is published.
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