Products do not kill stores. Suppliers do.
I have watched more stores die from supplier problems than from bad products: three-week deliveries that trigger chargebacks, quality drops after the first hundred orders, listings that vanish mid-scale. You can test your way out of a bad product in a week. A bad supplier burns your payment processor, your ad account feedback score and your reviews all at once.
The good news: AliExpress publishes everything you need to screen a supplier. Ratings, sold counts, delivery estimates, store age. Most people just never look past the price.
The five-minute screen
- 1
Rating 4.7 or higher, with volume
A 4.9 across 10,000+ orders is a real signal. A 5.0 across 40 orders is statistical noise. I want both the rating and the base it stands on.
- 2
Sold count in the thousands, and recent
The sold badge tells you the listing is proven at scale. Cross-check with the order history curve: 10,000 sold means nothing if 9,500 of them were last year.
- 3
Store age over one year
Open the seller’s store page. Stores under a year old disappear at the worst possible moment. Two-plus years with consistent ratings across products is what I want feeding my customers.
- 4
A realistic delivery line, in writing
The listing quotes a delivery window right on the search card. If it says 10 days, plan your customer emails around 15. If it says 30, the product is untestable for most markets no matter how good the margin looks.
- 5
Read the 1-star and 2-star reviews only
Five-star reviews tell you the product arrived. One-star reviews tell you how it fails: sizing, smell, breakage, wrong variant shipped. If the same failure appears three times, that is your refund rate talking.
The teaser price trap
Those $0.99 welcome-deal prices are first-order bait and will not survive your second order. Always price your unit economics on the normal listed price, and message the seller for real bulk pricing before you scale.
Before you scale: the two-order test
Once a supplier passes the screen, I place two orders before any ad spend: one to myself for quality, one to a friend in my target market for delivery time. Total cost is usually under $20 and it has saved me from at least three suppliers whose "10-day shipping" was fiction.
- Message the seller before ordering and ask a specific question. Reply time under 24 hours is a real signal of how refund disputes will go.
- Ask if they can ship without AliExpress packaging and invoices. Any serious supplier says yes immediately.
- Line up a second supplier for the same product before you scale. When listing one goes out of stock at 200 orders a day, you will not have time to start vetting from zero.
The five-minute screen plus the two-order test costs you half an hour and twenty dollars. The alternative, finding out your supplier is bad from a wave of PayPal disputes, costs you the store. I know which invoice I would rather pay.
“Your supplier is your real cofounder. Most people pick theirs by sorting on lowest price.”
Written by
MaximusFounder of Majorka
Built Majorka after years of running his own stores and being tired of guessing. Every post here comes from real tests, real ad spend, and real mistakes he paid for so you do not have to.
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See it in Majorka4.9/5 from 1,632 sellers
Orders · 24 wks
Scale23,491
