The experts of Roskachestvo developed recommendations for purchases on foreign Internet sites, and also explained the difference in shopping at the largest market places – Amazon and AliExpress.
“AliExpress, like Amazon, is a market place, but there is a fundamental difference – the dispatch of goods from AliExpress does not occur from the central warehouse of the company – each seller does this independently. Payment is made in rubles at the time of the order. In this case, the seller receives money for the order only after the buyer confirms the receipt of the parcel (each order has a protection period). It usually makes no sense to pay extra for delivery on AliExpress, as in this case the parcels will be marked ‘urgently’ in China, and in Russia in the general flow of parcels,” Roskachestvo said, as reported by TASS.
Amazon waits for the delivery of all the customers’ packages to its warehouse, collects them into one common package to be sent to the addressee. At the same time, the buyer pays for delivery only once, and funds are debited (in dollars at the Central Bank rate) not at the time of placing the order, but only after the store confirms the sending of the order to the central warehouse.
“Upon the arrival of the goods to the border, the buyer receives a letter asking them to fill out the customs declaration – you must follow the link and fill in all the fields. Sometimes they ask to send a screenshot of the order – this is a screenshot of the order confirmation that comes to the mail when the money is debited from the account. After the process Customs clearance delivery is carried out by local services,” the experts said.
However, the well-known name of the site is not a guarantee of security, but another reason to double-check the resource before purchase, experts at Group-IB Brand Protection say. Experts daily record fraudulent resources aimed at world-famous sites such as Amazon, eBay, AliExpress and others.
“So, in 2018, before Black Friday, they discovered more than 400 resources impersonating AliExpress and more than 200 resources aimed at other brands and online platforms, and the appearance of new ones is regularly fixed to this day,” analysts say.
But when buying on little-known “online sites” you need to remember the rules: carefully check the site address in the browser line before payment, as well as the domain name of the site on special services (the younger the site, the higher the risk of fraudsters using it), pay attention to the presence of a valid security certificate and contact information, using the HTTPS protocol.
“Do not make purchases while connected to a public wi-fi network (for example, in a cafe or metro). Otherwise, an attacker will be able to connect and intercept data through a Man-in-the-Middle attack,” experts say.
