Anyone used alibaba (chinese suppliers)?

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I am considering putting an order for... tea. A couple kilos of blooming fancy stuff (£30-50 worth / would cost me £1000s from rip-off UK supplier at over £1 per bulb). How bad (if any) would the customs taxes be?
 
Setting aside import taxes & duty (and can you import such foodstuffs) etc

I would be very careful checking the bone fides of any food stuffs supplier for personal imports from china. Some of the (major) foodstuffs issues reported in the past few years have reminded me of the middle ages here when food was adulterated for reasons of economy i.e. expensive stuff 'cut' with any old "stuff" resulting in significant impacts on the health of the consumers!!!!

PS a tad confused as to how tea and bulbs are 'related'??? All the tea I thought came from the fresh growth leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant
 
http://uk.alibaba.com/product/248804952-Blooming-Tea-artist-flower-tea.html

All tea of that sort comes from china. I pretty sure it is totally fine, same as the tea waste sold in supermarkets. Once the big box comes over here, companies like whittard repack it into tiny sample bags, containing 5 to 10 bits and sell it at hugely inflated prices (say £10-20). If you smoke, that horrid stuff is actually way cheaper in comparison. So I really wanted to cut out the middle-men.
 
Is this purely for personal consumption?

And a simple test is,would you buy this as a seen sample from Derek Trotter? - if not why would you buy it sight-unseen from Alibaba.. ..

Food products are an area where adulteration can be very difficult to detect by an amateur buyer (until it's too late). That looks like a product with a lot of hands-on fiddling to produce - which always increases contamination risks.
 
Tea came from China originally (the British exported it to india so that we didnt have to trade opium for it anymore) - however modern day china is notorious for poor quality control, so while it might be fine , it might also be crap

bottom line is whather you are willing to risk your money (and possibly health) to find out
 
big soft moose said:
bottom line is whather you are willing to risk your money (and possibly health) to find out
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So as long as it costs £1.50 a little piece and has been touched by the greasy fingers in UK warehouse, it is then suddenly fine? Or the dusty tea powder waste sold in teabags? If you drink unfiltered tap water, you are already contaminating your body with bleach and traces of all sort of drugs. I think you have to draw a line somewhere for the paranoia.
 
daugirdas said:
So as long as it costs £1.50 a little piece and has been touched by the greasy fingers in UK warehouse, it is then suddenly fine? Or the dusty tea powder waste sold in teabags? If you drink unfiltered tap water, you are already contaminating your body with bleach and traces of all sort of drugs. I think you have to draw a line somewhere for the paranoia.
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Indeed - I draw the line at sourced from a reputable supplier with good quality control processes - I'm not saying Alibaba arent such , but I don't know that they are (and many chinese suppliers arent)
 
daugirdas said:
So as long as it costs £1.50 a little piece and has been touched by the greasy fingers in UK warehouse, it is then suddenly fine? Or the dusty tea powder waste sold in teabags? If you drink unfiltered tap water, you are already contaminating your body with bleach and traces of all sort of drugs. I think you have to draw a line somewhere for the paranoia.
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I've worked in the food industry for several years and still have frequent involvement in it. I've done the industrial food safety training courses and implemented food safety management systems dealing with multinational supply chains. I've handled the UK end of insurance investigations dealing with substandard/contaminated imported foodstuffs. I wouldn't touch this sort of small-scale Derek Trotter import with a barge pole.

In favour of buying from a UK importer..
  • UK importers take responsibility for the supply chain, including vetting suppliers and production facilities
  • Responsible importers will be undertaking QA systems and implementing QC checks to sample for contaminants
  • A UK importer is subject to checks by trading standards hygiene inspectors
  • A UK importer carries insurance
All of the above accounts for quite a bit of the mark-up on the UK price. Mark-up isn't the same as profit.

The risk factors of importing as an amateur..
  • You're a mark for dumping the stuff that the major importers won't touch (including rejected material - buying a couple of kilos you're not going to be an important customer)
  • You'll have to fight any issues in a foreign legal system
  • You won't be able to detect even a fraction of the potential problems that could occur (until it's too late)
  • You're accepting full legal responsibility for importing the goods to the UK/EU (hence the very important question of "Is this personal consumption only?")
Possible risks that I can see..
  • Contamination with faecal coliforms if manufactured in a facility with low hygiene standards or passed along a poorly controlled supply chain (contamination at harvest will not be controlled elsewhere in the process). The time-temperature profile of making tea may not be enough to control this with this sort of intricate product - there may be areas in the folds and details that remain insulated for long enough to allow survival
  • Adulteration of the product with substitute materials (are you a botanist that could recognise the right plant parts from the wrong ones?)
  • Adulteration/contamination with potential allergens
  • Contamination with heavy metals or other toxic materials from material grown in contaminated soils or contaminated elsewhere in the supply chain (a worryingly frequent occurrence with supply chains in some parts of the world)
Call it paranoia, but it comes with experience of the food industry.


Have you tried going to a UK importer and seeing what deal they can offer for the quantity you're considering importing? - and going direct to the importer, not a retailer/wholesaler..
 
chris malcolm said:
Alibaba is bigger than Amazon.
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True - but alibaba isnt the importer - rather like Amazon Market place it is just facilitating buyer and seller transactions. Someone buying a couple of Kg from a chinese supplier is Del Trotter importing regardless of whether its facilitated by Alibaba, amazon, ebay or any other big service
 
chris malcolm said:
Alibaba isn't a small scale Derek Trotter import. Alibaba is bigger than Amazon.
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As already mentioned above, it's a commercial introduction/market stall for mostly near and far eastern manufacturers. Some of which are small Derek Trotter businesses, some of which are very large Derek Trotter businesses. Some are very reputable. Some are manufacturers, some are wholesalers, some are agents. Some have factories, some have warehouses and some have a pokey little office over a laundry. But unless you know who you're dealing with how do you tell them apart?

You don't buy from Alibaba, you buy through Alibaba. And unlike Amazon or eBay there's very little protection afforded to the buyer by Alibaba.

There's a big difference between importing a box of lens caps and a kilo of something you're going to ingest.
 
As said above be careful AliBaba and aliexpress are two of the biggest exponents in supplying counterfeit & Fake goods to the rest of the world.

What you get from them may not be what you are expecting, having said that the few times I have used then to buy items I knew where counterfeit, (just to wind a rich friend up) they have been delivered without a hitch.

Pul
 
It most certainly is for personal use, or else I would be looking at 10-100kg scale.

As a researcher I am pretty sure any residual "bugs" are killed by hot water, over 90C for 10min sitting in a closed teapot. I get to use very nasty stuff at work, so believe me a sub-ppm level of robin poo isn't going to scare me. I am more concerned about the quality of our water supply and stinky bus and taxi exhausts on the way to work.

ST4 said:
Just buy the Tea at your local supermarket. Waitrose will have a fine selection. You won't have to run into poor people, you will love it.
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Waitrose does indeed have a very small selection of decent tea, mostly black varieties. Most supermarket tea is either very poor or extremely overpriced due to fancy and unnecessary packaging to plastic teabags, and "cool" hipster-culture product exploitation, etc.
 
daugirdas said:
It most certainly is for personal use, or else I would be looking at 10-100kg scale.
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What I was thinking of was the implications of offering such personal imports to clients in a studio to create a bit of an up-market atmosphere - I don't know the details of your professional arrangements - where you'd have exactly the same responsibilities as any other business providing food.

Which reminds me, I need to post a thread about biscuits if no one else has done it yet.. ..
 
well, I have actually used Alibaba a couple of times to source items... Basically, a couple of years ago, I went on a pretty strict diet, and started riding the pushbike a lot. This resulted in my dropping quite a considerable amount of weight, however, I started very large indeed, and couldn't actually find certain items of clothing that'd fit. Alibaba had a number of sellers who did plain cycling kit (so I wasn't buying dodgy "knock off" or counterfeit kit, just plain stuff from the same production line as their less "legal" lines...) who did a Jersey and shorts combo for around £15 posted. I initially ordered 3 sets which came within a couple of weeks (they had to make them as a "special order" as I was over the standard range sizes they had in stock) and tbh they were fine... better than the equivalent priced "aldi/lidl specials" in material and finish, and... they were big enough. Happy Bunny. 3 months and 3 stones later, I needed the next size down, ordered it from the same supplier and waited. And waited. And emailed/live-chatted And Waited. And Waited, then they arrived. At the first order size, not the scaled down one. Complained, and they sent another set, 2 weeks later, they came, as ordered this time, but by this time I had shrunk and they never got worn. In the meantime, I'd gone via AliExpress to a different seller who'd sent yet another set which fit fine.

Overall, the kit was okay, the buying experience was "iffy" at best, and downright useless at worst. However the goods were cheap and didn't let me down - and for the cost of one Castelli shirt, I had 5 sets of cycling kit, in different sizes, which saw me through a year of vastly decreasing size and weight... Fortunately, I'm now down to a size where I can buy kit that fits me, and know it'll last more than 3 months, so I spend a little more and get good quality.

Would I recommend buying something from Alibaba / Aliexpress... it depends on what you're buying

- food/drink not bloody likely. Remember the Chinese Baby Milk Scandal
- clothing - quite possibly, but with the caveat that if it's a "brand name" it WILL almost certainly be a counterfeit.
- bike components - not a chance, which would go for anything that's got a "safety" aspect. Ali has a reputation (especially in the cycling world, where my experences of it lie) as being the place where lots of the factories that actually produce OEM equipment for the bike manufacturers dump their QC reject stuff, or, they knock out a copy of the kit (frames/forks/stems/bars/seatpins etc.) using lower quality carbon fibre and resin in the actual moulds that are used by the "day shift" to produce real Pinarellos / DeRosa / Colnago's...
 
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Mark and Alastair put more flesh on the bones of what l advising to be wary of!!! Contamination is not all bacterial and to be frank sitting in boiling water will not kill all possible such microbiological "easter eggs" not forgeting chemical contaminants are also a risk.

Very much buyer beware....caveat emptor!
 
Talking about this thread with a friend this pm - he recomends http://www.nbtea.co.uk/ as a uk based importer that sells direct to the public (they are in bedford)
 
Blank_Canvas said:
Just pop down to Tesco's and buy a box of Yorkshire Tea like everybody else!
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No. I am not telling you to drink Tesco value bitter instead of whatever you like.

big soft moose said:
Talking about this thread with a friend this pm - he recomends http://www.nbtea.co.uk/ as a uk based importer that sells direct to the public (they are in bedford)
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Thanks for that link. They have a some interesting things to try, but maybe not the very exact same produce I was after.

Interestingly they have some really odd products, priced even more oddly. I thought mint was common and cheap herb, but then I saw this. http://nbtea.co.uk/store/herbals/126-nettles.html NETTLES - the horrible weed that grows everywhere. Can you explain me £5 / 100g bit please? I could be super rich if I plant nettles around my parents farmhouse.
 
presumably they are special nettles grown at the foot of ygdradsil by virgin drawfs
 
daugirdas said:
Can you explain me £5 / 100g bit please? I could be super rich if I plant nettles around my parents farmhouse.
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There are some very strange people that will pay over the odds for certain things.. take rhubarb for example, given the price charged in the supermarket for half-a-dozen sticks I'm an allotment multimillionaire (on paper - along with most of the rest of the plot holders on our site).. and there's me just giving it away to neighbours by the carrier bag full when it's in season.

I suspect the reason people will pay for nettle tea is that they lack enough common sense and trust in themselves to identify and pick it themselves (and bear in mind 100g of dried nettle leaves probably represents getting on for a kilo fresh weight). Horseradish is the same, it's a very common weed and not hard to find or identify - but it's not a bramble, which is about the limit of wild food identification for 80% of the population.
 
I've worked in Mass Spectronomy for the last 13 years, and we do a lot of testing of foodstuffs.
Nearly all the dodgy stuff comes from the far east/China.
Saying that we tested oysters from whitstable a few years back and found that they contained over 100 times the EU safe recommended levels of toxins!!
I've also read reports that all UK dairy produce is contaminated with dioxins!!
You really don't want to know whats in the food you eat!
 
Carlo said:
I've also read reports that all UK dairy produce is contaminated with dioxins!!
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I have found on a numerous occasions that milk has a weird alien smell. My suspicion was always on the semi-translucent plastic packaging they use in all but most expensive ones. Do you reckon it is contaminated prior to dispensing?

Perhaps the weirdest one - and related to making tea - is how people drink tap water full of bleach, drug residues and what not... It smells disgusting and tastes very bad when you take a moment to test it.
 
daugirdas said:
I have found on a numerous occasions that milk has a weird alien smell. My suspicion was always on the semi-translucent plastic packaging they use in all but most expensive ones. Do you reckon it is contaminated prior to dispensing?

Perhaps the weirdest one - and related to making tea - is how people drink tap water full of bleach, drug residues and what not... It smells disgusting and tastes very bad when you take a moment to test it.
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FWIW for all drinks we use a water filter, at the very least that should remove some of the 'natural' contaminants found in tap water..................at least we do not get the scum on the tea and coffee :)
 
Box Brownie said:
FWIW for all drinks we use a water filter, at the very least that should remove some of the 'natural' contaminants found in tap water..................at least we do not get the scum on the tea and coffee :)
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Believe me you are an exception. Most people (including scientists!) pop their eyes when I mention such thing.
 
daugirdas said:
Believe me you are an exception. Most people (including scientists!) pop their eyes when I mention such thing.
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My good friend works for Thames Water (in quite a high up job) and two pieces of advice he gave me were;
To get rid of the smell/chlorine in the water, first decant an amount of water in a bottle without a lid and leave in the fridge for a day.
And water filters cause more problems than they solve by breeding bacteria in the filter membranes if not replaced frequently.
 
Carlo said:
And water filters cause more problems than they solve by breeding bacteria in the filter membranes if not replaced frequently.
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Plus, the jug filters don't really filter out very much any way. They claim to reduce carbonate hardness, reduce chlorine (no effect on chloramines though), possibly a reduction in lead and heavy metals (but independent studies don't support this and even the manufacturers claims are fuzzy) but they don't eliminate anything. If there's an opposite to homoeopathy it's the belief in jug filters. The carbonate hardness reduction is about the only possibly useful thing they do. Any chlorine taste/smell reduction is probably influenced more by just having the water standing in the jug after being poured.

And if you have an RO unit under the sink, I wouldn't personally drink from it - and definitely not of there's a DI resin filter in the system.
 
I'm on a borehole, but we use a filter jug to filter out the mud that would otherwise be in the water after heavy rain
 
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