I saw the video, and wondered if they bypassed Alibaba after finding the vendor - Alibaba has trade assurance with significant protection for the buyer and seller, including escrow until order is received and checked.

So it sounds like he basically tried to exploit Alibaba using them to find suppliers and then go to those suppliers for a better deal than he could have gotten through alibaba-- not caring that Alibaba provided protection against getting scammed.

Hard to have sympathy

This guys factory is just across the lake from where I live and this is painful to watch. Both Alibaba and the general local industry (metal fabs, train shops, etc) have high degrees of expertise in supply chain verification. You can hire (heck even bribe) experts along the way to reduce fuck ups. The video contained no mention of any audits, any additional paperwork beyond some pictures.

I once had a company that procured very simple electronics (fingerprint readers) from Taiwan and due diligence included travelling there, meeting every single person in the engineering office in person, then touring the contract factory where this would be built, then negotiating shipping and even driver development details.

This took all of one week and the price of a few plane tickets. We didn’t have the cash for professional auditors. In the end we got a product that worked, and even at a lower price (negotiating at a distance is not effective).

Was he buying from Ea-nāsir?

AliBaba sucks. Vendors and AliBaba charge you, the buyer, for all of their fees. And then whenever a vendor decides not to fulfill an order by canceling it, AliBaba refuses to refund all of the fees charged. And there's no way to leave negative feedback of a cancelled transaction. Screw that.

I the price is too good to be true it often is.

I think like credit card charbacks make harder for Americans to develop a healthy intuition on smaller stuff and eventually they get hit big.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee – I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, 'Fool me once, shame on... shame on you.' Fool me twice – you can't get fooled again."