The AliExpress Spreadsheet: What to Buy Direct, and When an Agent Gets It Cheaper

Which kind of AliExpress spreadsheet are you looking for?

Search suggestions for "AliExpress spreadsheet" split in two directions. Some point at shopping: "shoes", "clothes", "reddit", "telegram", "2026". Others point at record-keeping: "tracker", "template", "for orders", "download". And the TikTok pages that rank for the phrase mostly show people comparing an AliExpress price with an agent haul. So there are really three jobs here, and each has its own page.

Search suggestions read from Google and Bing on September 29, 2026.

The first two overlap more than they look. A lot of AliExpress stores are resellers of the same factories you can reach on 1688 or Taobao, so the question for most items is not "where is it sold" but "which route costs less once shipping, duty and the risk of a bad size are added up". The rest of this page answers that with numbers where they exist.

Verdict: One or two everyday items: buy on AliExpress. A clothing or trainer haul from a shared sheet: price the agent route first.

When is buying straight from AliExpress the better deal?

AliExpress has been Alibaba Group's store for shoppers outside China since 2010. It takes cards and PayPal-style wallets, shows prices in your currency, and its official Buyer Protection page makes three promises that no agent matches after delivery:

• Refund if nothing arrives within the guaranteed delivery window printed on the order page.
• Claim within 15 days of receiving an item that doesn't match its description or photos, or arrives damaged or short.
• Free returns within 15 days of delivery on eligible items, using a return label; a change-of-mind return is on your shipping bill.

The exclusions matter for spreadsheet shoppers: underwear, socks, food, batteries, customised items and anything AliExpress prohibits are not covered by the return policy. Refunds go back as an AliExpress refund bonus or to the original payment method.

That makes AliExpress the easier choice for anything cheap, light and generic: phone cases, cables, small tools, kitchen bits. There's no account at a second company, no top-up, no weighing and no international shipping quote to approve. For single items it also avoids the agent's fixed costs, which are small per order but painful on a $6 purchase.

Verdict: If the item exists on AliExpress in the version you want and you are buying one or two things, the direct route is simpler and better protected.

When does an agent beat AliExpress on price?

A shopping agent is a company in China that buys from Taobao, Weidian or 1688 on your behalf, receives the items at its warehouse, photographs them, and ships everything to you in one box. Three things can make that cheaper or better than AliExpress:

1. The factory price gap. WorldFirst's guide to 1688 gives the example of an item listed at $8 on AliExpress and $3–4 on 1688. AliExpress prices include the seller's international shipping and platform costs; domestic Chinese prices don't.
2. Shops that aren't on AliExpress at all. Most of the listings on community spreadsheets are Weidian stores. Weidian doesn't ship abroad, so an agent is the only way to buy from them.
3. One parcel, photographed first. An agent combines items from any number of shops into one box and sends QC photos before it leaves China, so a wrong colour or size is swapped locally instead of posted back across the world.

The costs run the other way: an agent may charge a service fee (0% to around 6% on the agents we track), card top-ups can carry 3–5%, and you pay international shipping by weight. Sugargoo, for example, published a 3 kg clothing parcel at about $27.94 to the UK and $55.18 to California. Spread over ten items that is a few dollars each; over two items it wipes out the saving.

Verdict: The agent route pays off from roughly five items upward, or for any item that simply isn't on AliExpress.

For a line-by-line look at how each agent charges, see the full list of spreadsheets; to see how an order moves from link to doorstep, read how each route works.

A single sheet with thousands of rows is how most shared lists begin, and it is also why they get abandoned: nobody scrolls past two hundred tees to find one pair of runners. Search suggestions show what people narrow down to — shoes, clothes, sunglasses, football shirts — so the finds are split the same way. Every category sheet notes what to check before buying that kind of item, whichever route you use. The last three tiles are tools rather than finds.

Verdict: Buying one type of thing? Open its sheet. Building a first mixed order? Start from the 20 tiles above and top the parcel up from the under-$20 sheet.

Why five small parcels can cost more duty than one

Until 2025, a small AliExpress parcel crossed most borders without a tax bill. That has changed in three big markets, and the change favours fewer, larger parcels:

Rules as published by the Council of the EU (Dec 12, 2025), GOV.UK, CBSA and the Australian Taxation Office; US position from a CBP summary on importcostcalculator.com.

Take an EU order of five items from five AliExpress stores, each arriving in its own parcel. Under the July 2026 rule each parcel owes €3 per item category, so five one-item parcels pay €15 in duty. The same five items in one agent parcel holding three categories (say tees, trainers and a bag) owe €9. VAT is due either way. AliExpress's Choice and Combined Delivery programmes can merge some orders into one parcel, but only for eligible items shipped through its own logistics.

Verdict: In the EU and the US, count parcels as well as prices. The duty calculator does the sum for your country.

Work it out for your own basket with the one-parcel-or-five duty calculator, or read the country pages for the US, the UK, Germany, France and Australia.

Is AliExpress safe to order from?

Mostly yes, with two caveats worth knowing. On Trustpilot AliExpress scores 1.9/5 from 188,401 reviews, a split picture: 63% of reviews give five stars and 29% give one, with the complaints clustering around refunds, automated support and lost parcels. The newest review we saw was dated September 28, 2026.

The regulatory record is the second caveat. The US Trade Representative put AliExpress on its Notorious Markets list in 2022, and in July 2026 the European Commission fined it €550 million under the Digital Services Act for failing to assess and reduce the risk of illegal and unsafe products. For buyers this mostly means branded-looking listings are removed more often, so a saved link can go dead without warning.

The practical protections are the ones on the Buyer Protection page: pay inside AliExpress, never through a link a seller sends in chat; open a dispute inside the 15-day window if an item is wrong; and screenshot the listing when you buy it, because listings get edited. Our refunds and returns guide goes through each step, and the order tracker calculates the deadlines for you.

Verdict: AliExpress is safe to pay; the risk is in slow disputes and vanishing listings. Keep evidence and track the dates.

Which buying agents were working at our last check?

If you take the agent route, the first question is whether the agent is still trading: several popular ones have vanished with customers' balances inside. Of the 30 agents we follow, 23 were working normally on September 29, 2026, 3 had mixed or worrying signals and 4 were offline or closed. Green here means the website loaded, accepted a pasted listing and showed no closure notice, and recent reviews were still arriving.

Sources: each agent's website, rep.tools, KakoGuide, CNBuyPilot and Trustpilot. Status can change within days; load the site yourself before adding money.

Verdict: Use a green agent and top up only what the next order needs. A balance is money you can lose if an agent disappears.

The status board explains each colour and can be filtered.

Each page below takes one agent or one rival store and asks the same question from an AliExpress shopper's side: for the kind of thing you'd normally order there, is this route cheaper, safer or faster, and what does it cost you in effort? The agent pages cover fees, free storage, QC photos and review records; the store pages cover returns, delivery and what each sells that AliExpress doesn't.

How the finds on this AliExpress spreadsheet are checked

The tiles come from 600 listings pulled from repbuysheet.com for this site and cleaned before publishing. 15 were duplicates across batches. 40 were removed because the lead photo belonged to a different listing from the one the link opened, which is exactly the mismatch that produces an order you didn't expect. 6 carried prices too low to be real (under ¥10, or a boot or jacket under ¥40). That left 539; the ones with a clear name and category appear as tiles, and all of them are in the catalog table, which you can download as a CSV.

Prices are in US dollars first and yuan second, as the catalog showed them on the day of the check. An agent converts at its own rate and adds the seller's delivery to its warehouse, so its total will differ a little. The photos are the seller's; if you buy through an agent, the warehouse QC photos are the ones to judge.

Rather skip the agent account?

Message us a link or a screenshot. You get a quote with delivery to your country, photos of the item before it leaves China, and the tracking number once it ships.

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