This is my first 11.11 rodeo and I don’t even know where to start.
General tips welcome 
Ali, hifigo, linsoul… How should one go about making the best of the sales at each?
For us in the EU, hifigo can ship in a way that avoids 25% VAT, so that immediately makes sales there more attractive than ali where VAT is added automatically at sale.
With this in mind, if the product is on hifigo, it is likely to end up cheaper or the same price if you used all the coupon-fi power you got on Aliexpress. Otherwise, on ali before you order, you should go to the seller/store and click on the follow button, sometimes that does give you a tiny discount automatically. Be on the lookout for coupon codes, they are usually stuff like Spend 100 usd get 10 usd off.
iirc this site tends to be good at documenting the coupon codes.
Thank you!
I’m in Belgium. Standard shipping on Linsoul will also omit the VAT in my experience. (Both HifiGo and Linsoul use a logistics trick by both underdeclaring the value and grouping many small orders into 1 big one. Here they call it Matroshka shipping. 100% illegal, but they almost always avoid detection)
Also, make sure to check out the package deals on Linsoul and $25 & $50 coupons you can buy for $1 and $2 respectively.
Don’t be afraid to split up your orders to maximize your coupon usage if they don’t stack.
Coins can get you 1-5% off on a lot of offers even with no 11.11 or Chinese New Year’s going on. Sometimes you can even see 7-10% just from coins, but always always always check price + discounts + shipping (add to cart and look at the real total) because usually they make some offers seem cheaper by moving some of the amount to the shipping price and you get screwed vs. the actually cheapest option. 
You can easily get a lot of coins by opening the mobile app daily and tapping Collect, then you can open the Gogo Match game for another +20 just for logging in, and if you don’t mind playing 4 levels you can get 5 more after the first level and 20 more after the next 3 levels. But by far the best in coins per effort is to just open the app daily as that amount gets to 70/day after 6 days.
They used to have Search for Similar Items in the product popup frame you got on hovering over a search result, it used to be a quick way to find cheaper offers for the same product, but lately it shows unrelated garbage. The equivalent is now if you go to the product page on mobile, open one of the product pics by tapping it, then use “Search for Similar” there - it gives you alternate prices on the exact same product like the hover-frame used to last winter.
Watch for the campaign-wide discount codes, those have to be entered manually and they’re single-use, so you have to make sure you’re using the highest one that’s valid for the total price of the cart you’re completing. Some sellers will show you those codes in a single image with multiple colors to show country-specific codes. For those it makes sense to bundle stuff in a larger cart to use the larger value code, then make a smaller cart to use the next lower-value code and so on.
As mentioned above, each seller may have an extra coupon to offer just for being a follower, so absolutely click Follow everywhere you see a good offer you’re going to consider a serious contender to compare with others. It doesn’t fill your inbox with spam or anything, so there’s nothing to lose.
Then with each seller’s larger coupons usually they’re restricted in terms of which products they can apply to (even if the price is a match), so you have to investigate to get clear on that one. I’ve had instances where a lower-value shop-wide coupon was overriding a much better product-specific coupon, and there was nothing I could do except if I had paid attention I could’ve maybe not clicked Collect on the shop-wide one until I got clear on what each of the product-restricted ones did for me first.
There’s a lot of “coupon engineering” 
they require but if you go deep into it you can get some ludicrous discounts, like I have a solar power station, refurbished, that I got for less than half of the new-product price last Cyber Monday, and it has no defects. They tried to cancel, claiming they didn’t have any more stock, but I just extended the shipping term by 1 month and stood my ground, and they delivered in January after all. 
Absolutely, coins do help a lot.
There is something like that on pc as well.
Clarification, it does message the inbox in the aliexpress app
I mean sure, at first they message you with a suggestion for more products or to promote their coupons, but then you can go into the conversation’s options at the corner and turn off Seller Promotional Messages. It works for me, I don’t get flooded. And I don’t think those initial promotionals are related to clicking Follow specifically, they’re more about you adding some product to your wishlist or cart.
hmmm, ok you may be right. I had it on.
In which case there really isnt a con to following all the stores that you buy from.
Oh and another thing to take care with is false advertising to make a much lower-grade product look like it’s the same as a more famous higher-grade one. Usually they mix photos of both, I guess they have to have at least one real one for plausible deniability(?) but that’s the dead giveaway to look for: pics not all of the same product, even just one pic looks like it’s a way worse quality product, just run. Turn the other way and run.
Also last-decade-quality 3D renders and zero photos of the real product strongly correlate with shit products.
And the classic thing to look for: store reputation.
I kinda need some recs. Got both the linsoul coupon code for the 11.11 sale and gonna use the 50$ one on S08 and some eartips (clarion and s&s probably) to meet the minimum spending. I still got the 25$ coupon with 60$ minimum spending and plan to get another IEM in the 50-60$ region or maybe two iem which totals to 60/70$ max. Any recommendations? I want a different flavour compared to the S08. Thinking about Kiwi Cadenza and Tripowin Vivace, or tangzu yuxuanzi or xuan nv, simgot ew200, ew300, ziigaat cinno, kefine klean. But is there any more interesting or unique iem in this price range? Sorry if its a bit out of place though. Thanks!
Not sure if this is covered above but if you have a lot of coins collected before making any purchases through the basket.
Click on “COINS” on the homepage and then if you look carefully there is a small orange button saying “DISCOUNT FINDER”.
If you click that you get the maximum coin discount offerings for anything you recently looked at or have in your basket. Sometime coin discounts here can be over 50% and most times above what the coupons offer.
If you already collect the AliExpress store wide coupons from the 11.11 sale options they can then be stacked with this additional coin discount as well as any seller coupons as detailed above.
Issues - this only works when you click buy it now option for each individual items instead of adding to basket.
Issue - if your buying small stuff from choice by this means you will need to order enough of the one product to qualify for free shipping otherwise you would pay shipping on each item.
Issue - you actually get better deals this way outside of the sale periods when sellers are desperate to make sales and so provide large coin discounts.
A few discounts that may help, I’ve been through a lot of these sales for the business.
If you have a business tax ID certificate for exemption, you can sign up for it at Alibaba and then it exempts you on Aliexpress. They do this for U.S. businesses now, started doing that a year or two ago. What that does is qualifies you as a business account, which then gets you 3% cash back in Aliexpress credit on orders over $100.
PayPal MasterCard has 3 percent cashback, and Capital One sometimes has it, but you have to log into their web site to activate it. I just fill the shopping cart, log into Capitol One to click through for the discount, and then wrap it up. The Emo browser addon works for it too, which gives a unique virtual credit card number for each merchant (which you can deactivate if you want later). Turn off ad blockers and go to the Captal One discount page to click through or it doesn’t work (they send a confirmation email about the cashback purchase, so you’ll know).
Some credit cards automatically double warranties up to 12 months, but read the fine print of what’s required to activate it. Sometimes they require an authorized service center to send a report or letter stating what’s wrong with it, so read it really carefully. I print everything and put it in the box in case I need to use it in the second year. Extended warranties are such a ripoff, because they only activate after the 12 month original warranty, and if you pay by credit card you get that second year for free anyway.
Check ahead of time how they’re going to ship it. A few months ago many merchants switched to Shippo or Piggyship instead of USPS. The problem with those carriers I found was they will show “Out for delivery” for up to 3 days before it arrives. Only the phone with notifications setup will tell you when they already dropped it off at the doorstep. It’s pretty nerve wracking depending on your location. If it says “premium shipping” then it’s usually USPS, but high value items sometimes use DHL (like $300+). I had a $189 DAC delivered Piggyship and they left it at a house in a different development with the same house number. Maybe ask the store how that item will ship ahead of time.
On the Summer sale I got the SMSL H400 amplifier for $350 after stacking all discounts, if you haven’t seen a Singles Day sale, it’s well worth checking out, don’t miss it. Cyber Monday is similar, so not the end of the world if you do miss out (not a long wait like missing the Summer Sale anyway).
Yeaah I didn’t mention that one because I’ve never found any offer that was really better than just looking for lowest price+shipping+coupons+(regular)coins. Most of the coins-offer-finder things are tricks where the percent they accept paid through coins is high but the base price is also higher than other offers, or they hide the extra in the shipping price. 
Always add to cart to really judge.
But sure, with enough digging there may be gems in there too.
Sorry, to correct myself a bit here, that’s after you’ve opened it for 7 consecutive days to reach the 7th-day daily reward tier that includes 20 coins. Then if you continue you can keep getting that same reward every day.
I would say recently the discounts skew to the finder more as you can double them up by collecting the coupons - you effectively get the best of all worlds even if the price of the item is 1-2% more than the cheapest basket based possibility as the coin discount is usually over double what you can get normally and can be over 50%. Issue I find is the ability to only buy 1 type of item and so that is where clever basket composition when you have multiple different items in the basket to maximize coupon to spend ratio is preferential.
Aight, I’ll have to look at it from that angle too then. They change these things from season to season too, so you can’t apply 100% of what worked last year and still get the best results.
Yeah 100% Aliexpress like to play the game and keep us on our toes. 
Glad to find another bargain hunter here 
Myeaah, I don’t know about that, we’ll see what happens on 11.11 but right now I’m seeing a better price on Ali:
The thing is, if I open it from another browser with extra privacy features and I don’t log on, and make myself look just like a rando from the Netherlands (via VPN), I can’t even find that store’s offer (aka. “electricxiaomi”) when searching for the product, and even if I open the product page with the direct link, it shows a higher price + “can’t ship to your country”. So some offers can be different by country, even within the EU, to the point that the VAT difference which should be a whopping 19% better for me on HiFiGo, is nowhere to be seen.
Anyone in Germany can give me tips on good deals on aliexpress? Seems like lots of stores just dont deliver to Germany and even if they do, the price is stupid. Like S08 on letshuoer and linsoul is 99$ but on aliexpress its 115€ which is more than 120$.
Im making a video for HifiGo. Ill probably post it here when it i ready. Got their sales list early.
