I have about 200 orders through the years, including some expensive stuff (like a KNote8 hybrid tablet) I use Aliexpress for 5+ years now. I use AliPay, their own payment method, using my own credit card, and I had zero problems with it -mind you, my PayPal account has been hacked, and they did steal some money from it about two years ago, so AliPay was safer for me-, I find it much more reliable than Amazon or Ebay.
So far I had one lost package, which I got refound (a bit slow process though, as you will have to wait for 60 days before you can ask for it, and the seller has 30 more days to refound you, but in my case he did it in a week).
I had some (like 3 or 4) faulty products (like broken tempered glass protector, etc), if you send the picture of what is wrong, most seller will give you the option to resend it to you or refound you. Basically they will try to do their bests to earn a 5 star rating from their buyers.
The only thing you should take into account is that the shipping time is much longer, most of the stores have warehouses only in China, so it could possible take a month (or even more now, because of the pandemic) to have the shipment. But if you are lucky, you order from a store that has a warehouse "near" you, in this case it would be just a couple of days to get it (the fastest order for me was 6 days, they have sent it from Germany, I live in Hugary).
As the best advice: you should order from stores and goods that has quite an amount of positives in the begining. Later on you will have experience about Chinese brands, you will know which one is good quality, which one is not.
