For the last four weeks I’ve been doing a challenge. Buying items from Wish and AliExpress that were as similar as possible, and comparing them. I shopped, I hauled, I swatched, and I arted. Now I’m concluding.
I had fun. I always (well, nearly always) have fun when I’m shopping, hauling, swatching, and/or arting. And for some of the items there are definite preferences. Like the pencils. The pencils from AliExpress would snap all the time, wouldn’t sharpen, and felt rough to use. So they lost.
Similarly, the coloured pencils from Wish were very unpigmented and hard to get decent colour from. So they lost.
The erasers were practically identical. The sharpeners looked different but basically performed exactly the same. And the inking pens were pretty much equal too.
So in terms of performance both sites are equal. However, when you take into account the cost difference that’s when we find our winner.
The pencils from Wish cost £2 including postage and took 1 and a half weeks to arrive.
The pencils from AliExpress cost £1.59 including postage and took 5 weeks to arrive.
The erasers from Wish cost £3 including postage and took 2 weeks to arrive.
The erasers from AliExpress cost £0.60 and took 2 weeks to arrive.
The sharpener from Wish cost £2 including postage and took 3 weeks to arrive.
The sharpener from AliExpress cost ££0.45 including postage and took 6 weeks to arrive.
The pens from Wish cost £8 including postage and took 4 weeks to arrive.
The pens from AliExpress cost £6.77 including postage and took 1 week to arrive.
The colouring pencils from Wish cost £4 including postage and took 3 weeks to arrive.
The colouring pencils from AliExpress cost £3.38 and took 1 week to arrive.
Either way, the shipping is gonna be any amount of time between a week and seven weeks. So I’m not gonna take that into account. The total for Wish was £19 and the total for AliExpress was £12.79.
Going by the stats then, AliExpress wins. But with all these sites it can be very hit and miss. If I’d only ordered the stuff from AliExpress, I would have been really disappointed in the pencils.
Of course, the true indicator of which site is better is that in the two years since I actually did all that stuff, I’ve only shopped on Wish maybe once. Whereas I’m always on AliExpress and have a semi-constant stream of little packages arriving from the other side of the world.
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Last week I promised you a bonus piece of art. Well, like I said, I did all this 2 years ago. My art skills have improved considerably since then. So, in the same vein as the Follow Up monsters I did a few months ago, I redid the little fairy.
Here’s what she looked like two years ago:
And here’s what she looks like now:
Crafted By Colette 
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