I’ve had no issues with Gearbest and I continue to order from them. But there are others.
Since you’re not aware of any other china “flashlight shopping malls” you should check these ones out, several also now have a USA warehouse stocking many flashlights:
Highly recommended: Banggood:http://www.banggood.com/Wholesale-LED-Flashlight-c-2037.html
They have the prices and selection and ship just as fast, sometimes faster than GB. They also have partnered with BLF for group buys on special edition lights, and I’ve not had any issues with my orders from them either.
Gearbest is the cheapest in a lot of cases. They rotate Ganzo knifes in deals for example.
Just be polite and repeat your issues when something is a miss.
Since they corrected all my problems and I know I will order more I accept store credit in case of refunds making the CS experience a breeze
All stores Beam0 is talking about and gearbest alike are having a few trades in common
Slow, the worst one can do is actually wait for an order and chack delivery status, this will drive one mad order and forget check back after a month and you just made it a better experience
Another thing they have in common, you pay them and in case of issues they lose money when refunding. Hence the feeling one get like walking through quicksand while dealing with CS.
Check AliExpress.
It is a platform that handles the registration and payments for you at a numerous amount of sellers.
The platform benefits from reliability and they only pay sellers if the buyers marks an order arrived. If there is something a miss buyers can start a dispute
If you can prove faults or something did not show up and seller can’t prove its arrival to you you’ll be refunded. For AE it does not matter who they wire the funds to, in other words, they don’t lose .money.
Also when an order is made you get a number of days called buyers protection. When this is over your order will be marked as if it arrived, but you get plenty of emails warning you about it so ample warning to take further action (messaging seller, extending protection or start dispute)
I have had 346 orders now
7 times the system emailed me they suspended an account of a seller because of suspicious behaviour and I got refunded over those orders.
+1 for Aliexpress, another good place to buy flashlights direct from China.
I thought about adding the site to my list but it’s not really an online store, but an online marketplace for many sellers, however as The Miller pointed out, any issues are handled through the Aliexpress protection/dispute system between buyer and seller.
I’ve also ordered a lot through Aliexpress over many years (mostly knives) and I’ve had very little problems, the seller usually refunded half and I’ve even had full refund and keep the product.
Just play it right.
As soon as one confirms delivery funds are paid to seller so only do that when satisfied.
For example I got a Colrui with damage on reflector
Message to seller with pics
He said OK you get a new reflector and my reply was; thanks I ask for extension of purchase protection” and did that.
Within a couple of hours it was extended and he gave tracking number.
Very nice.
Sometimes in case of problems they ask “did it arrive”
My default reply is “something came but not what I ordered so I have to say no at this point”
P.S.: and, for some reason, cancelled the order 2 or 3 times and ended up doing it on the mobile site because I was repeatedly being sent to PayPal checkout with the wrong (no postal upgrade) amount. :person_facepalming:
Here is one I just had to post. I first used gearbest from one of dazed1’s deals for a Lumintop SD75, which probably due to that came with cheap DHL shipping. Fine, but then I read all the horror stories and swore off them for any purchase that I could not afford to lose. So after that I have spent once over $25 and that was 32. The rest have all been under that. A few orders around $10 and some even lower, you know, cause gearbest. Of course always with Paypal. I just had to have a analyzing charger and bought the LiitoKala Li-500. I paid 6 cents for faster shipping, and to my surprise, it is coming from?? New Jersey? Chinese scale and all. Not holding my breath for it. I expect normal 2-3 week shipping times, anything else will be surprising.
I’m puzzled by how many people have had so many positive experiences with GearBest. I’ve had too many negative ones lately. Overall, only about 60% of my orders have arrived, and for the other 40%, I’ve been offered a refund to my wallet. The problem is, when I made purchases with the wallet money, and that order never arrived, well, GB well and truly had me by the short hairs. I politely requested the refund 2-3 times, but I never saw that wallet money. Remember, GearBest wants to get you on their playing field and as far away from PayPal as they can.
I sympathize with those reporting frustrating problems.
But it’s hard to evaluate the usefulness of this information, suspecting that bad experiences are likely to be reported here more often than good ones.
I have had really good luck with GB — with over a dozen orders now. Seems to be getting faster too.
Even though, Richard at Mtn. gets the order for the important stuff.
I’ve placed maybe 10 orders with GB and never had an issue other than poor packaging (but nothing broken). I’m guessing maybe 90% of the orders get through with no problems but for the unfortunate 10% trying to resolve things is a terrible experience.
That's likely the case with many other vendors as well. GB had been one of the slower shippers for me last year, but I've noticed a marked improvement in the past few months with the new cheap priority shipping and US warehouse options. I still don't buy insurance on principle, but when priority shipping is available for a buck or less, I do opt for it and get good trackable numbers. In fact, my last 2 orders are due to be delivered in the next 2 days. The first order was out of the China warehouse placed on apr 12 and a 2 week delivery from China is on the faster side of average for me. The other order was out of the US warehouse placed on apr 21 and was actually cheaper than from China. It's not Amazon prime fast, but not bad at less than a week.
I have also had my share of damaged items from inadequate packaging, but so far they have been good about refunding or replacing, as long as I clearly detail the damage and attach good photos when opening the ticket. I don't go overboard trying to write a novel and having drawn out conversations with them, just a concise description and a photo with the problem highlighted if necessary. I have however been lucky that the damaged items have been less than $15 and mostly less than $5. Thankfully, the $300 quadcopter and other high dollar lights and gadgets have arrived without incident, though some with dented boxes. Clearly they still need to work on better packaging, but the shipping speed has definitely improved for me.
Yep, that’s what they did to me, too. I had two tickets processing to get refunds for a product that never arrived. There were several cordial e-mails back and forth about how the $$$ would be refunded, and then poof they disappeared. No sign that they’d ever existed. That’s when I’d had enough and went to PayPal.
Just checked and it's the same with my tickets as well. I think it might have something to do with their new ticketing system, as I get this message when I click on the "Notice" link.
Welcome to Gearbest's new Support Center!
2016-03-27 13:39:10
Certainly not the best way to go about an upgrade, especially for buyers who still have outstanding tickets.
I just checked one of my old ticket emails and the link still works. Make sure you're logged in, then copy and paste one of your old ticket links from email to a new browser window. Then delete the ticket number at the end of the link so you just have "http://support.gearbest.com/index/index/ticketlist", which should then list all your old tickets. I wouldn't expect them to respond to any new messages on the old beta system, but you can at least copy and paste any outstanding tickets into the new system.
When they refund you they will say it and then it takes a couple of business days to show up on your PayPal overview.
Dang so they have a new system making the old not show.
Again a reason why saving the text as PDF right after posting a reply is useful, I’d start a new ticket right away when that would happen to me. (They closed one once and I started a new one with providing the text from the closed one as soon as I saw that)
order and forget check back after a month and you just made it a better experience 
