AliExpress 11.11 Pricing Tricks

Sellers on AliExpress love to use the classic ‘fake-price’ sale trick. It’s a very obvious bit of trickery, almost quaint - and I doubt too many people fall prey to it. You’ve seen it before - something like this:

Regardless, AliExpress does have some really good deals, if you know how to find them among the scams and rip-offs. Since I had been scraping AliExpress every day for weeks, I was excited for their 11.11 sale (their version of Black Friday) - hoping that there would be some really good Mini PC deals to pick up. But what I found instead was the complete opposite:

Across our corpus of hundreds of Mini PCs, we found that stores systematically deleted or delisted their listings between October 26 and November 10, replacing them with fresh or higher-priced listings so that even after applying a headline $60 or $100 11.11 coupon, the buyer pays more than the machine’s previous early-October price.