Gearbest is a big Chinese e-commerce store that sells a plethora of products. It ships globally and this allows users to buy some Chinese products which otherwise may not be available outside China. Earlier this year, we had a report about some irregularities with Gearbest. If you are a regular buyer of Chinese goods but reside outside China, you will probably know Gearbest. Two months ago, the company completely shuts down. Their website was inaccessible and when you try to access the website, it shows an invalid URL. However, a check on Gearbest’s global website (https://gearbest.com) redirects to https://it.gearbest.com.
Everything on the website is Italian, however, it transferred all the information from its old global website to the Italian website. Users can still log in to their old Gearbest accounts which have all their history. This means that all transactions, complaints, and messages remain intact. However, everything is now in Italian. Thus, if you don’t have any translation tool, you may not be able to understand anything.
This may be a piece of good news for users who had pending transactions with Gearbest. However, we can not be so sure if the company will pay claims from the old English website. As for its affiliate website, it never went down and everything appears to be working just fine.
Recall that Gearbest “disappeared” without prior information to its numerous customers. Many of these customers had pending transactions which the company is yet to deliver. Now that we have the English website in Italian, is something fishy going on? We tried to contact the company via live chat but our request met an error message. Furthermore, we submitted a ticket to the company but there is no response as of press time.
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It is important for all users to know that this e-commerce platform appears to be very unstable. All users have to thread with caution when dealing with this company. There is no certainty that changing the old English website to Italian will change things.
A few complaints on Gearbest
Here are a few complaints regarding Gearbest before the Website shut down
“Terrible support, terrible working staff, and most of all – no way to communicate with them. Their email is not receiving more messages, either this or they just fail to respond. I escalated to PayPal two of my failed orders because they never bothered to deal with them. They said it was due to Chinese New Year, but it’s been all this time now, and still no more reply from them”.
Or,
“I’m so tired of Gearbest’s “in stock FAKE” technique! They lure the buyers to buy stuff that “appear to be in stock” but then you remain waiting for them for OVER 1 or 2 months! And when you try to ask for your money back, they propose their silly Gearbest points as a way to refund you!”.
And another,
“Gearbest is not entirely a scam but I can’t market for them anymore. After requesting my affiliate earnings, they didn’t respond to emails. I had to resort to their live chats and after a month of rigorous follow-up, they eventually paid. I can’t take the risk of marketing for them anymore”.
Another wrote
“I have bought a cellphone (Xiaomi Poco m3 128bg) on 4th January 2021 and I still haven’t received it. Everyday week (sometimes, several days a week) I open a ticket to ask for a refund and Gearbest keeps asking me to wait. They keep telling me excuses. I need a phone to work. If this situation is not solved soon I will contact the authorities and communicate a robbery.”
