Being like eBay is why it's full of chaff. There's a lot of really bad hardware on Aliexpress.
You either take a gamble on something and hope it's good, or try to buy the same thing that someone else bought and reviewed.
I always figured that was the trade-off for paying 1/3 the price. Having to buy 3x as many to find a good one. :P
"Another Slot A motherboard :(, maybe the 4th one I buy from AliExpress will finally be that X870 motherboard I want!"
I've never received something other than what I've ordered. At worst the documentation is scant or missing entirely. Specifically with respect to motherboards, most of the aliexpress specials I've interacted with have had completely unlocked BIOSes. Which are easy to get yourself into trouble with, but kind of nice to have when you need them.
I think most of them just don't customize their bios and use the default fully-wide-open implementations from the upstream bios vendor.
Have you heard of paying with PayPal/credit card?