General > General Technical Chat
Aliexpress' bugged interface: "Unpaid" items duplicate when paid
ebastler:
--- Quote from: Whales on August 15, 2022, 10:56:44 pm ---
--- Quote --- I avoid those online chats (bot or human agent) if I possibly can, for the very reasons and frustrations which you described. Googling for "Aliexpress cancel order" brings up a reasonably helpful Aliexpress support page as the first hit:
--- End quote ---
Solving this myself feels very unwise. If it was caused by a website/db sync bug: what other problems might occur when I cancel?
--- End quote ---
I don't see a fundamental difference between following the guidance of the Aliexpress chatbot vs. following the guidance of an Aliexpress support webpage. I guess my point was mainly that I find these chatbots to be a very inefficient way to convey information. I'd much rather do a Google search, then I can skim through the results quickly and hone in on what looks relevant.
Whales:
You misunderstand.
In the end I followed advice from a human representing Aliexpress after explaining my problem to them. Not advice from a chatbot or a support page (if we ignore my attempt with "double payment", but that was clearly not considered appropriate by Aliexpress). Aliexpress' chat bot and support pages do not have instructions on how to handle website bugs.
"Cancelling orders" and "disputing" are choices that can be made in a number of circumstances that have complex ramifications, especially if the seller disagrees. Neither the Aliexpress chat bot nor support pages will help me if this happens. Obtaining direct advice from a human being who works at the company is the only appropriate action when dealing with website bugs involving financial transactions and multiple parties. Any mistakes made on my part when trying to solve these problems, eg if I follow something I found via Google or interpreted in my favour from the support pages, can/will be blamed on me if I first do not get advice from the platform operators.
ebastler:
All good, as long as you have eventually found a solution, or at least a partial one. But the solution you describe in reply #3 is exactly what the support webpage (i.e. the first Google hit) suggest, right? Just sayin' that you could have gotten there with less aggravation.
Whales:
BUMP
It's happened again (but this time I'm not paying). It looks like the duplicate orders were made on the same day I made the actual orders, notice that everything is shown twice in the screenshot below.
In my original post I thought my ordered were duplicated after I repaid them, not before. Perhaps I was wrong and they were duplicates from the start.
Aliexpress is the only ordering website I've ever had these issues on. This latest order was placed by me on a single computer with one cart in one session on one day.
Maybe the alix cart or order submission system isn't properly atomic'ing cart order submissions? Any of the following could then potentially cause this (non exhaustive): my web browser resending due to failed TCP connection (bad internet/routing/servers), me manually refreshing due to broken page loading (sometimes Alix's website doesn't work at all and you have to come back later), database backends not synchronising correctly (order request records duplicating). This is one of the many problems that online cart systems have to tackle, it's why web browsers warn you that certain actions (eg pressing the back button) may "re-submit" things and why websites redirect you to "order has already been made" pages sometimes.
Either way: this is a Aliexpress website bug to be wary of. The one shopping cart on Aliexpress can be ordered "twice" without you realising. Same computer, same session, user only thinks they have done it once.
It is the responsibility of the sales platform to ensure only the agreed items are ordered, it is not the responsibility of the user to fix the platform's internal bookkeeping (and risk making unintentional payments). In practice yes unfortunately you often have to fix other company's paperwork for them because they suck (I used to work admin, if you ever have then you know how bad some companies are at even simple things like actually providing invoices), but that doesn't make it right. Not offering full cancels + refunds immediately to correct the error is even worse.
I suspect this time support will tell me again to manually cancel the orders. I'm going to do my best, but I can't help but feel like I'm going to somehow end up with them telling me I've cancelled the wrong orders or otherwise done something wrong. Let's hope not.
For the moment I can't get a human on the chat so I won't do anything. I already looked at the "cancel order" feature on these unpaid items and it wants to know why I want "a refund", which of course makes me feel like something totally wrong is about to happen if I continue.
thm_w:
At least this time it says Awaiting Payment, hopefully it means no payment was processed yet.
This can happen if you try to pay and the payment is rejected (bad CC expiry, etc.).
But yeah, I would still go in and manually cancel them all.
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