My Gearbest Shopping Experience

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Most people tend to think of online shoppers as fools who rush where Angels fear to tread. Nothing can be further from the truth. When done right online shopping can be quite beneficial and even with the current difficulties when it comes to making international payment and sourcing US dollars to fund your account.

I should know all about it, I have shopped online on many occasions since 2011. Today I am going to share with you my shopping experience with Gearbest.

Why Gearbest

For a long time my favourite shopping site was Everbuying but not only have their prices gone up when compared to say Gearbest, their shipping takes too long to deliver to Zimbabwe. It’s you either pay DHL or have to wait 70 days to receive your phone. That’s just 20 days shy of 3 months! If there are delays in actually shipping the product then you might even have to wait three months.

Gearbest’s deliveries are faster (25-45 days) when it comes to delivering to Zimbabwe. They accept PayPal, Visa/MasterCard, WireTransfer and even Western Union payments. They have drop shipping options and you can choose between Netherlands Post, Swedish Post or Belgium Post when it comes to delivery. All are faster than Singapore Post or China Post in my experience.

Placing the order

I placed my order on 30 November because I wanted to take advantage of Black Friday flash sales. You see while local retailers use events like Christmas to hike prices Gearbest was offering up to 50% discount. During checkout I entered my address, created an account, selected Registered Post using Belgium Post because it was the cheapest option. Unless you are buying item of very little value always select Registered Parcel as your shipping method as it allows you to track the package. It is entirely up to you whether you want insurance or not if your goods are damaged Gearbest will refund/resend them either way.

Making Payment

I have my Visa card linked to my PayPal account as an extra-layer of protection. During my earlier stints with online shopping I found it extremely hard to get ignorant Zimbabwean banks to institute a charge back. Most of the staff that man these information desks can be quite inexperienced when it comes to online shopping. With PayPal you can just launch a dispute if something goes wrong and contacting a shop’s support does not work. Making payment for my Gearbest Order was routine.

Items shipped out

Once you make payment you will notice that your Gearbest Order’s status changes from awaiting payment to Processing. You can access your orders by logging into your Gearbest account and selecting orders. During the processing phase there is a button labelled “Dispatch Faster”. You can click on it if you want but I think it exists for therapeutic reasons only. Clicking on it makes you feel important.

Most orders are shipped out in 24 hours and mine was dispatched out during this period. However because it was on a weekend my tracking number revealed no information until Monday 4 December.

Tracking the shipment

Once an order has been shipped you can track its progress on the shipping company’s site. For Belgium Post you can either use: BPost China site or Track24 . the later comes with multiple shipping company tracking ability and even supports Zimpost. Track24 also comes with an estimated delivery period which in my experience is pretty accurate.

As already mentioned Gearbest delivers to Zimbabwe via Netherlands Post, Swedish Post and Belgium Post. A little triangle shipping is involved. In my case the item was picked up by Polar Express Shipping (a BPost affiliate) and delivered to Belgium and this took 2 weeks (from 4 November to 19 November).

The parcel was then handled i.e. the address changed from Belgium Post’s to mine and put in a batch destined for Zimbabwe. In order to ship cheaply, Belgium Post relies on economies of scale so my package had to wait there for a week until there were enough packages destined for Zimbabwe. This does not happen when it comes to popular destinations such as Belgium to Brazil where a package can be reshipped in one day.

After a week (December 26) the package was flown to Zimbabwe i.e. country of destination. This is where tracking ends as Zimpost does not support the Belgium Post system. During this period the package was examined and opened by ZIMRA (who were curious I guess) and evaluated for duty purposes. On January 10 I received an SMS on my phone from the local Post Office telling me my package had arrived and was ready for collection.

After a quick visit to the Post Office and making payment via Ecocash for the handling fee and ZIMRA duty and I had it in my hands. All in all it took about 37 days for the package to get to me from date of actual shipment. That was faster than other shops but slower by Gearbest’s standards because my order was bought and processed during the Holiday season.

Seeking validation

After my items arrived I decided to try and determine if I had made any savings or had been foolish to buy online. The total cost of my purchase was $55 including shipping. I had just paid $19 to Zimpost. We will look at this in future articles but I did not buy the USD I used for the purchase but assuming I had bought these at a pessimistic rate of 50% the total cost would have been:

$82.50+19

= $101.50

One of the equivalent items was selling locally for $120  on Ownai and the other item is not available locally but equivalent items are selling for around $150. I don’t even have to do the Math to show you I how much I saved. Buying each of these items locally alone would have cost more than the cost of buying both from China.

So was buying online worth it

For me and my frugal streak that’s a hell yes. The only hard time you will have is waiting for delivery. I have shopped online more times than I can remember and still that child like anticipation and waiting for shiny new things never goes away. The waiting is going to kill you but in the end when the item is in your hand it is all worth it.

Should you buy from Gearbest?

If you hate low prices, saving money, buying goods that might not be available locally because other people don’t buy them a T.V Box for example and like wasting money on people who like to hike prices towards each holiday then by all means don’t buy from Gearbest.

I see no reason to stop buying electronic gizmos from them as these are not made locally so the buy Zimbabwean mantra does not apply here. It’s different from say buying a dress online now, in my experience, that would be pretty stupid.