I have only ordered once from GearBest, and three times from Banggood. So far, all my experiences have been good.
PayPal understands online buying. It has a mostly fair dispute policy, especially now that the window for filing a claim has been increased to 180 days (in the USA, at least, and elsewhere). I used PayPal for all of my purchases.
When the GearBest order screen informed me that I would have to pay separately for tracking and insurance, I bought both. With my Banggood orders, tracking was included automatically at no extra charge. Banggood did not offer insurance (at least not in the suggestive, you-need-this-unless-you-want-a-hassle-with-us-later way that GearBest did).
My opinion is that every order from overseas should be tracked. When GearBest offers you a chance to pay for that service, you should jump on it.
At this stage I am still wary of purchasing from the major online dealers in China. There are some products I simply won’t buy there. Li-ion batteries are one of them. Although I bought Li-ion batteries at Banggood as part of the group buy that M4D M4X ran alongside the the BLF A6 Special Edition group buy, my standard MO is to buy batteries from the trusted vendors in the USA (where I live). For Convoy flashlights, I am inclined to purchase only from Simon or Mountain Electronics. Except for budget flashlights such as those made by SiPiK, my first notion will be to purchase flashlights in the USA or directly from a manufacturer such as Zebralight or ThruNite.
Given sufficient inducement, I might decide to “gamble” with an overseas sale, but if it does not work out, I will just accept the settlement that PayPal arranges.
What I won’t do is act surprised when there are problems.
Any problems I have had have been dealt with, but I’ve had to be assertive. But you can’t argue with all the missing orders I and other people are having. I do feel they are going to get into a lot of trouble here on BLF. It is staring to remind me of Dino a few years ago.
Pay for tracking no (only 1.99) if you have problems with your postal service, in 8-9 months total over 60 orders from abroad I had only one missing package and it was li-ion samsung s3 phone battery from ebay
I order all the time from banggood, I don’t pay for tracking and it gets here without a problem.
Why can gearbest not do this?
As I am typing this a banggood order for 4 led light bulbs has just arrived in 12 days. The order was only $4 and no tracking. Now the strange thing is it was sent via NL post. Most of my stuff from Gearbest also comes via NL Post but takes months! Why?
I’m still waiting on 2 orders that total under 12 bucks from July. First time something has ever taken this long… I’ve ordered from a ton of places… Never have I seen so many orders not showing up from one vendor. I feel like there’s a problem with the service they use to pick up their mail. If they want to improve customer service they will need to fix this quick. Or people will start going with alternatives. My advice. Always use tracking.
In the interests of fairness my long overdue Olight Striker torch arrived today. It was a bit crushed and the torch itself does not want to change modes easily at all but those problems are to be fair more to do with Olight and the postal service than it does GB.
While ’oogling yesterday (looking for 1xAA/2xAA NiMH drivers), I came across a flashlight/electronics seller in India —- selling many of the same things we’re familiar with, some of them at comparably OK prices, free shipping.
It might be just another tentacle of the same Great Big Seller that wears so many masks, or it might be a separate operation.
If a few orders come through OK I’ll name that one.
So y’all might want to look around a bit outside China for sources to check.
They may not have the same polished and sophisticated, overcomplicated, flashy websites
(I think the China sellers are moving toward websites that attempt to communicate (as Kurt Vonnegut wrote of the Tralfamadorians) by “tapdancing and farting ”)
But sources in India might have decent deals on stuff we’d like, coming from outside China.
Well I am well and trully hoisted by my own petard on this one. I have just checked and it was not on my order list gor GB. It turns out it was ordered from Banggood on the 12th of September. The Olight I ordered from GB on the 13th has still not arrived.
Your sense of self importance seems amusing, you didnt piss any one off, Brad was rather vocal, yes, but not pissed. If you would read responses in that thread more carefully, youd see that nobody got pissed there at you. But, anyway, this thread is about Gearbest non delivery and not about you.
Same here, ordered two of Xtar H2 lights in mid-august, none arrive, opened Paypal dispute, Gearbest promised resend with tracking number paid by me or full refund, I asked for full refund, days passed, no more response so escalated to a claim, now the waiting begins, but Im sure everything will be OK ;)!
Re-ordered this same light with tracking number(I wonder how come Fasttech offers such cheap tracking number while Gearbest asks 2$ for it?) to see it during transit.
3 more orders reaching their 60 days limit, so will go Paypal route there too+my order with Xtar H3 and Jetbeam HC20 has its issues as well - Xtar is low quality, Jetbeam is not working as advertised, it flickers and I sent Gearbest PM here on BLF asking for help, they said they can issue me GB points and asked how much would be OK. Should I settle for GB points? I dont think so, dont want to look like a crook with Paypal because these are rather big purchases, Ebay once tried to slap me with their warning message of too many disputes of non-receipts or not as advertised, but I dont care, its not my responsibility if the seller cant make it right and tries to avoid responsibility.
So far, I have not had any missing or incomplete orders out of the 21 orders ranging from $0.10 to $120 dating back to April 2014 that I have made. They do however, take their time to get here compared to some of the other overseas sellers. I’ve never had tracking as detailed as the one posted earlier, but it looks like China Post goes through a lot of consolidation before it even gets out of the country, which could explain some of the long delays. Slow product arrival I can deal with, but missing or incorrect orders do appear to be on the rise judging by some of the postings here. I wonder how much of this is related to orders with several items versus just 1 or 2 like I typically do.
I have 6 items ordered in early August, the only 2 to arrive had European tracking numbers. The rest have a number but it seems like it is unregistered? Anyway no more unregistered or non tracked from these guys. PP claimed on the rest. I don't think GB totally at fault. It seems like they sent them by looking at the photos maybe they never made to the PO or the PO workers took them home??
GearBest is too unreliable anymore. I earlier this week I got emails from PayPal telling me they had decided in my favor on four claims I’d made about purchases from GearBest over the summer.
I have a hard time fully blaming GB. The biggest problem is they stopped using tracking. If you research back, this isn’t the first, but one of many times (any products that value can be found in) of the Chinese postal service coming up with bs excuses to steal orders. Had it happen this year for lights, in the past for several things. And without tracking (and in some cases with) there is no way to even argue that the Chinese postal service is stealing packages again.
GB seriously SCREWED UP by doing away with tracking, now their paying the price.
But I don’t see it as trying to “screw people over”. Hell even had problems with USPS several years ago having untracked packages “get lost” enroute or vanishing in US customs.
Hopefully they learned their very expensive lesson (fasttech did the same thing and now their a go to place). But well see what happens. Maybe they’ll wise up and use the same methods dx and fasttech does so we get packages in a couple weeks. Till then, I always pay for the faster shipping anyway (just order enough to be worth it).
