Here is my interim review. The site was built and delivered as advertised. Communication with seller was very good and responsive. For the money, the setting up of the Ali Express plugin, and the loading of the products, was more than worth the money. Having done a couple of eStores before, the time it takes to load/categorize that many products is well worth the price charged for the labor alone.
Some observations:
They ran out of products in my niche, so they loaded women's apparel (definitely NOT my niche) to make up the difference to 5000 products (which was weird), so I had to spend some time deleting all the products that didn't make sense for the site. Also, I could not get the automatic product update feature to work and have to do it manually.
The backlinks provided are just ok, and they have very poor anchor text diversity. They are working with me to fix.
Don't ask for many changes to the site. The plugin does not support a lot of customization. Annoyingly, I really like how the site was originally set up, but I asked for one small change and the look of the site changed significantly. It is a deal where you have to be willing to accept what they give you in terms of the site.
As I said, the site is more than worth the money in just in the labor involved. The real question is, though, can it rank, and will it convert? Those questions remains unanswered. My site is still so new, it hasn't appeared in any SERPs. I have some serious questions as to whether G will penalize the site significantly for thin/affiliate content. I am still waiting to see how hard this thing will be to rank, and if it is possible to run this site as a long-term affiliate site, or whether it only monetizes under a churn and burn model by throwing backlinks at it.
Conclusion: great communication, customization is very limited, be careful of the backlinks, and the jury's still out on whether this thing can make money, much less over the long term. All in all, however, the initial investment is so low ($49 as of the time of this review), it was worth I to see if and how the Ali Express affiliate model - using this plugin - can rank and make money.
I will give it 90 days and update this review. Thanks for reading.