alt Hacker NewsAliExpress shipping is wild.. as far as I understand it they try to find the cheapest place to send packages from, so (living in Europe) I've received packages from Australia and Azerbaijan. They probably send a palette of stuff to a country that has cheap International postage, and from there the palette of goods get broken down and packaged for the 1000s of end-consumers..
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Yeah, I used to get stuff directly from China, then after the postage rate changes I was getting packages that had gone China -> Thailand -> Azerbaijan -> USA. Nowadays they seem to batch packages for the good shipping, from Aliexpress in China to (I assume) some US subsidiary, and then from there it gets parceled out to a shipping company seemingly at random (Maersk, Amazon, USPS).
I regularly get addressed Aliexpress packages that contain multiple addressed packages (e.g. from the same order), so they may in fact be sending pallets full of packaged and addressed items to another country for re-packing and re-shipping