Swiss address on AliExpress

How to enter a Swiss address on AliExpress.

The problem

AliExpress has a stupid interface for entering your address – it makes you select the country, then the canton/region/state, then the city, all from drop-down lists. Of course, their drop-down lists are incomplete: e.g., for most cantons in Switzerland, they only have the capital city and nothing else.

If you contact their support, they will tell you to select the “other” option. But this option is only available on the web, not in their app, and even there it does not work due to what seems to be an obvious bug in their code.

Here is how to work it around. You will need a desktop computer for this, I do not know of an easy way to do the same from your phone.

Step 1: Add your address with the wrong city

Suppose we want to add an address in Engelberg. Engelberg is not on the list, so we just choose the city that they offer:

Save this address.

Step 2: Change to Other country

Now go back to your shipping addresses and edit the address that you have just added.

This time, in the list of countries, change your country to “Other Country”:

You will see that it has pre-filled the form with all your information, except for the country:

This is where their bug is – if you try to save this address because there is no country specified! So we will have to “hack” their system instead.

Step 3: Obtain the update request

In Firefox: Go to Menu → More tools → Web Developer Tools
In Chrome: Go to Menu → More tools → Developer tools

Click the “Network” tab. Then select “XHR” for Firefox or “Fetch/XHF” for Chrome:

Now enter your real city in the form.

Press “Confirm” in the AliExpress form to submit your address update. You will see it appear in the list in Developer Tools.

Right-click the request and select:

In Firefox on Linux/macOS: Copy Value → Copy as cURL
In Chrome on Linux/macOS: Copy → Copy as cURL

(For Windows, select “Copy as PowerShell” instead.)

Step 4: Fix and execute the request

Now open your Terminal (on Windows, open PowerShell). And just paste from the clipboard:

(It will look slightly different on Windows.)

There will be a lot of text, do not worry about it. Just scan the text from the end until you find &country=OTHER& (highlighted in the screenshot).

Change this to &country=CH&:

All done! Now press Enter, and you should see something like this:

If it says "success": true at the end, congratulations! You can now go back to AliExpress and check your updated address.

(If you are getting something else, try to copy as cURL/PowerShell from your browser, paste, and edit the line again.)