The short answer
Temu is the best Chinese online store for most people, on one number: ninety days to raise a problem against fifteen at AliExpress. AliExpress has the catalogue and the escrow. SHEIN settles the customs bill at checkout. DHgate holds the money until you confirm the parcel arrived, which is what you want when the order is large.
Price still carries a quarter of the score under how we rate, and it is not what this page argues about, because everything here is cheap and the gaps are small. What we argue about is what happens when the wrong thing arrives, and who pays the import bill, which after the rule changes of the last year is a different answer from the one most pages still give.
What happens when the wrong thing arrives
The single most useful table in this category, and we could not find it anywhere else. Every figure is the vendor's own, read on .
Temu gives you 90 days. SHEIN gives 30 from delivery, and 90 from the order date if the item is faulty. Wish gives 30, or 30 from the maximum delivery date if the parcel never came. Alibaba gives 30, or 60 for Enterprise buyers. AliExpress gives 15 days from receiving the item. DHgate publishes 30, but the route that covers almost every real complaint closes at 7 or 21 days depending on category.
Put Temu and AliExpress side by side. Those are the two biggest names in the category and they are six times apart, with the bigger one on the shorter clock.
One caveat on that comparison, because nobody else makes it either. The clocks do not start in the same place: Temu counts its ninety days from purchase, so shipping time comes out of it, while AliExpress counts fifteen from the day the parcel reaches you. The gap is still large. It is not exactly six times.
DHgate needs its own line, because its headline is misleading. Thirty days after you confirm receipt, sixty for VIP customers, is the number it leads with. But the route that covers almost every real complaint, "item was not as described", closes at 7 or 21 calendar days after delivery depending on category. And you get one dispute per order.
Who pays to send it back
Two platforms have converged on the same rule to the cent. Temu and SHEIN both give you one free return per order and then deduct $7.99 from the refund on anything after that.
AliExpress gives free return within its fifteen days, with change of mind on you. Alibaba gives free returns to a local warehouse within thirty days on orders under $3,000, in a listed set of countries. Wish says the customer pays "in some cases".
DHgate has no platform rule at all. Every seller sets their own, listing by listing, and free return exists only as an optional premium-service badge on some products.
The ones that would rather not have it back
Almost nobody explains this and it changes how you should complain.
Wish is the most explicit: "Please DO NOT send the goods back to Wish or the seller unless specifically instructed to do so." DHgate offers "a refund without returning" on seller-fault claims within 21 days. Temu runs advance and instant refunds that pay out before the goods move. SHEIN reserves full or partial refunds without a return.
Return postage from Europe or North America frequently costs more than the item, so a platform that refunds without one is not being generous, it is being rational. Ask before you post anything.
What the parcel costs to get through customs in 2026
The import rules changed twice in the space of eight months, and this is the section the page exists for.
United States. Duty-free de minimis on shipments up to $800 was suspended for all countries by executive order on 29 August 2025. A Federal Register rule effective 24 June 2026 then made that suspension indefinite for every mode except the international postal network, and required those shipments to use formal or informal entry procedures rather than release from manifest. The short version: the $800 free pass has been gone for a year and the paperwork behind it has since hardened.
European Union. The EUR 150 customs duty relief was removed on 1 July 2026, brought forward from the originally planned 2028. In its place, from 1 July 2026 to 1 July 2028, the Council adopted an interim flat customs duty of EUR 3 levied on each different category of item in a small parcel, identified by its tariff sub-heading. So a parcel holding three unrelated things can carry three charges. The Council does not say who bears it, and the accountancy reading is that it falls on the declarant, meaning the seller or importer, rather than being billed to you at the door. Separately the Council has mandated an e-commerce handling fee from November whose amount has not been set.
And not one of the six has updated its own customs pages for either change. AliExpress still tells EU buyers that "Parcels with goods valued no more than EUR 150 can also enjoy customs duty exemption". DHgate still splits its guidance at EUR 150. Wish still describes the pre-reform position.
Two of them handle it in practice anyway. SHEIN states an all-in checkout total in both regions and that you will never be asked for tariffs later. Temu includes VAT and customs charges in EU prices, or takes a deposit and clears customs for you with no top-up if the real charge is higher, while its US terms say prices exclude duties and you may be the importer of record.
The other four are not all the same. Wish folds VAT and duties into the price above EUR 150 and collects EU VAT at checkout below it. Alibaba collects VAT, GST or sales tax under marketplace facilitator laws and says nothing at all about duties. AliExpress and DHgate collect EU VAT below EUR 150 and leave duties to the carrier. If you are ordering from those two, budget for a bill on the doorstep.
Escrow, and which of these actually holds the money
Three do: DHgate, AliExpress and Alibaba. The seller is paid after you confirm receipt, so a dispute is argued over money that has not moved.
Three do not: Temu, SHEIN and Wish. You have paid the platform and you are relying on its refund policy.
Neither model is better in the abstract. Escrow matters most where the seller is a stranger, which is exactly the three that have it. Where the platform is itself the counterparty there is nothing to hold the money against: Temu and SHEIN are close enough to being the seller that their own refund policy is the protection. What you should not do is assume the money is being held when it is not.
Pick order is not score order
Alibaba scores 7.8 with the strongest buyer protection on this page, and sits outside the four. It is business-to-business wholesale with minimum order quantities, so almost nobody arriving from this search can use it. Sourcing rather than shopping, and the same reasoning that keeps a commerce platform out of a website builder ranking.
DHgate is the pick with the loudest caveat attached. Its headline dispute window says thirty days, and the route that covers almost every real complaint, not as described, closes at 7 or 21 days after delivery depending on category. DHgate publishes those category lists as images with no readable text, so the term you are held to is one you cannot search.
It is a pick anyway, on the mechanism underneath: the money sits in escrow until you confirm the parcel arrived. That answers the order that never turns up, or turns up as something else entirely, which is what goes wrong most often on this page. Read the window, then use it early.
Wish is our only verdict C here. Its score is last on catalogue and logistics rather than on trust, which carries only a twentieth of the weight, so the arithmetic and the verdict are answering different questions. The verdict is a judgement, and the judgement is this: the terms you agree to still name ContextLogic B.V. as your counterparty, and ContextLogic sold the business to Qoo10 in April 2024, and the page is stamped Last Updated 22 February 2021.
Why there are no delivery times on this page
Every competing page has a table of them. Ours does not, because we placed no orders and a delivery estimate we did not measure is a vendor's marketing repeated back to you.
What we compared is published terms: dispute windows, return costs, refund mechanics, escrow, tax and customs treatment, warranty periods and seller verification, all read from the vendors and dated. If shipping speed is your deciding factor, buy one cheap thing from two of these and time it yourself. That is a better test than anything we could publish without doing the same.
Most of the pages competing for this term are cashback or affiliate content and disclose it, which is fine and worth knowing while you read them. Our own position is in the footer and on how we rate, where it is generated from the link data rather than typed into a page.
