I have bought quite a lot of stuff from Aliexpress myself. When you buy BJT's or Fet's they tend to be fake, never dared to buy an USB stick or SD card from there. But overall experiences are quite acceptable on average. When you go for the "cheapest" deal, quality seems to be quite a lot worse then when you're willing to pay a bit more for a similar product. For example, I've bought two 24000 RPM spindles, my first was a cheap one, and I bought the second from G-Penny, and it seems a lot better in quality, but I have not run it yet. It's been gathering dust for 3 or more years now, while progress on my second CNC machine is very slow indeed.
But every now and then something does go wrong. I've had a few packets which never arrived, at least one packet got scrapped or sent back because I only had a week to go to the post office to get my package though the last 3km, and christmas and new year got in between. I just write it off. Even with those outliers, buying "western made" products would have been much more expensive. Prohibitively expensive even.
I've also bought a bunch of stepper motors (most Nema23 112mm long, some Nema17 and two Nema34 10Nm), and I never had a problem with those. But there are quality differences. On Hackaday / Youtube there was a test in which similarly sized Nema17 motors had a factor 2 to 3 in performance difference. With stepper motors, there is also a tradeoff between torque and maximum speed.
For the bigger motors, I won't be buying open loop motors anymore. the closed loop versions perform much better, and the price difference is becoming negligible. Usually you can also use a closed loop driver with an open loop motor, you just disable the feedback with a dip switch. This does give you the option to upgrade the motors later.
Here in the EU, there are also a bunch of "local" shops which sell the same stuff as what you can find on Aliexpress / Ebay / China, and I guess similar options are available in Canada too. But if you don't trust a courier, then those also become more complicated to order from.
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