Is AliExpress Safe? Your Money, the Product Itself, and How to Check a Seller

Is AliExpress safe? It's a genuine marketplace owned by Alibaba Group, and its refund scheme, Buyer Protection, covers orders that don't arrive or don't match the listing. That protects your money, within limits. It says nothing about whether the product is safe to use, and in July 2026 the European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million for failing to assess the risk of unsafe and counterfeit products on the site.

Who you're buying from

AliExpress launched in 2010 and belongs to Alibaba Group, according to its Wikipedia entry. It doesn't sell anything itself. Its Terms for EU, EEA and UK consumers, in the version dated 14 May 2025, put it in one sentence: "Each Online Transaction is made by and between you and a seller only and AliExpress.com shall not be considered as a party to such Online Transaction."

That is why one order goes well and the next goes badly. Each purchase is a contract with a different independent business, and the platform owes you only what its own rules promise.

Is AliExpress safe for your money?

There is a refund scheme that covers it on paper, with limits you should know before you order.

You pay at AliExpress checkout and the seller isn't paid straight away. An article on AliExpress's own site, dated 12 February 2026, says "Buyer funds are held by AliExpress until the order is confirmed as received". The Terms are narrower. They describe the money as "held by Alipay", the payment provider, and say that for its supplemental payment service AliExpress is "not acting as a trustee, fiduciary or escrow". So when a guide tells you your payment sits in escrow, that is the guide's word. The contract doesn't use it.

The refund promise is on AliExpress's Buyer Protection page. When we read it on 4 October 2026 it said: "Get a refund if your item doesn't arrive, arrived damaged, or isn't as described within the protection period". For a damaged, incomplete or wrongly described item the page gives 15 days from receiving it. For a parcel that never comes, the deadline is the guaranteed delivery window shown on your order's detail page. The route is the same in both cases: contact the seller, then go to My orders, open the order and choose Return/refund.

Where it stops:

• The page excludes some goods from its return policy: "prohibited items on AliExpress, underwear, socks, food, batteries, customized items".
• The Terms say AliExpress "may also provide buyers a protection plan for certain Online Transactions". That is an offer for some orders, not a blanket right.
• The Terms list the statutory rights of EU, EEA and UK consumers separately, among them "withdrawal rights within 14 days" and "a minimum 2-year legal conformity guarantee right". We couldn't find a primary source on how those rights apply to an order shipped directly from China, so don't count on them for that kind of order.

Don't confirm receipt until you've opened the parcel and tried the item. By AliExpress's own account, confirmation is what releases the payment, and its February article says a dispute has to be opened "within 15 days of confirming receipt". The Buyer Protection page counts its 15 days from receiving the item. Whichever applies to you, the window is short, so go by the dates on your own order page.

What buyers say about getting a refund

Here the picture is worse than the policy page suggests.

On Trustpilot, AliExpress had a TrustScore of 1.9 out of 5 from 188,542 reviews when we checked on 4 October 2026. The split is unusual: 63% of reviews gave five stars and 29% gave one, with almost nothing in between. The complaints are about broken, counterfeit or wrongly described products, refunds that were hard to obtain, missing parcels, automated support replies and complicated returns. A reviewer called orlac wrote: "My order vanished into thin air, and their only solution was a rigged 1-euro voucher".

Trustpilot reviewers choose to write and aren't verified as buyers, so 29% is not the share of orders that fail. The figures also move every day.

In the US, the Better Business Bureau's profile on the same date gave AliExpress a D- rating, marked it "Not BBB Accredited", and counted 1,487 complaints closed in the last three years alongside 428 customer reviews. The profile doesn't break those complaints down by cause.

Our reading: the protection is real, and the people who write about claiming it describe hard work. Order as though you'll have to prove your case. Photograph the parcel before and after you open it, keep a screenshot of the tracking page, and file inside the window. The steps are in how to open an AliExpress dispute, and the Buyer Protection guide covers the scheme in more detail.

Is what you buy on AliExpress safe to use?

Seller ratings can't answer this half of the question, and a regulator has ruled on it.

On 20 July 2026 the European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million under the Digital Services Act. The Commission's announcement says the company failed "to diligently assess the risk of dissemination of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products", and it names "counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products". The decision followed a step on 18 June 2025, when the Commission accepted binding commitments from AliExpress and issued a preliminary finding that it had breached its duty to assess and mitigate the risk of illegal products. The law firm Lewis Silkin reported on 24 July 2026 that AliExpress says it will appeal.

The fine concerns how the platform manages risk across its listings. It is not a finding about any single seller, and it has nothing to do with sellers taking money and sending nothing.

For a buyer the consequence is narrow. A star rating records what buyers thought of an item when it arrived. It can't tell you whether a toy has passed a safety test or what is in a face cream. For the categories the Commission named, and for anything a child will use, we'd buy from a retailer that answers to your own country's safety rules, however good the listing looks. Counterfeits are a separate question, covered in are AliExpress products fake or real.

The payment that leaves you outside the protection

AliExpress's own help article on whether it is a trusted site says: "if a seller asks you to pay through an external link or service, it's a red flag that should be avoided." The security firm F-Secure described the pattern on 2 December 2025: someone contacts you privately, claims a payment problem or offers a discount, and asks for a transfer by PayPal, Venmo or bank transfer. F-Secure's advice is "Never pay outside the AliExpress checkout process".

None of the AliExpress policy pages we read says outright that such a payment is uncovered. Our reading of the Terms is that it is: Buyer Protection is a plan for transactions made on the platform, and a transfer made elsewhere isn't one. If a seller asks, don't pay, and buy from someone else.

How to tell if an AliExpress seller is legit

Nothing on a store page proves a seller is honest. Four things shift the odds, and it helps to know which numbers come from AliExpress and which are somebody's rule of thumb.

Positive feedback. AliExpress's help page on seller ratings defines it as "The percentage of positive reviews compared to total reviews" and gives no threshold. AliExpress's February 2026 article suggests looking for 95% or more, and F-Secure uses the same figure. We found no published average for the marketplace, so be wary of any guide that quotes one. AliScore uses a stricter scale of its own: 85% counts as zero and 100% as full marks. That is our choice, and the formula is on our how it works page.

Store age. The same AliExpress article says "4+ years is a good sign". We couldn't confirm where on a store page AliExpress shows the age, so we won't point you to a spot.

Followers. We found no source showing that a follower count measures a store's age or its repeat customers, so don't read it that way. We'd treat a very low count on a store selling something expensive as a reason to look harder at the other three.

Review count on the listing. A high rating from a handful of reviews tells you little: with 11 reviews, a single unhappy buyer moves the rate by nine points. AliScore treats fewer than 10 reviews as too few and pulls the score down. That cut-off is ours as well. For listings in that position, see buying from an AliExpress seller with no reviews.

For where each figure appears, see how to check AliExpress seller ratings.

Running the seller check faster

The seller half of this post is the part AliScore automates. On an AliExpress product page it shows a 0–10 score as a badge, with a panel that breaks the score into quality, sentiment, trust and value. Its seller trust score comes from the store's feedback rate on the strict scale above (70%) and its followers (30%). A listing with fewer than 10 reviews is marked down, and one with no data gets "not enough data" instead of a score. On search results the badges sit on each product card, so you can compare listings without opening them all.

The panel also gives a verdict, from "Safe to buy" down to "Risky". Read that top label narrowly. The score is a heuristic over public data and knows nothing about whether a toy or a cosmetic meets safety rules, so "Safe to buy" means the listing scores well on what buyers and the store page show, and no more than that. It can't win a refund for you either, and you still need to read the reviews.

A disclosure, since this post is about whether to shop there: the AliScore extension earns an AliExpress affiliate commission. The price you pay doesn't change, and the details are on our privacy page.

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