Gearbest website is DOWN, leaves customers stranded

Earlier this year, we had a report about some irregularities with a Chinese e-commerce store, Gearbest. If you are a regular buyer of Chinese goods but resides outside China, you will probably know Gearbest. This store used to be one of very few Chinese online stores that ships globally. This allows users to buy some Chinese products which otherwise may not be available outside China. To beat the competition, Gearbest had pretty cheap shipping and its prices were quite good. Well, that was back in the days, we can not say the same of Gearbest now. Since the beginning of last year, this online store has been struggling to survive.

The first sign of trouble was when its products suddenly became the most expensive online. At the time, only very regular users of Gearbest noticed that its goods are now very expensive which could spell trouble. Subsequently, the company modified its policies which made business very difficult for affiliate marketers. At this point, we knew that Gearbest was struggling to pay off its marketers. However, there were hopes that the company will somehow manage to stay afloat.

However, this did not happen as the sinking continued. Early last year, the once e-commerce giant now had very terrible customer support, refund procedure, and other financial issues. At this point, it was struggling with orders and in some cases did not ship orders. Also, the store barely had any product in stock, whenever you check, it’s always “out of stock”. Furthermore, its once-vibrant customer service became lukewarm and it was overly difficult to get a response. Even when you get one, you can be sure that it wouldn’t make you happy.

Gearbest’s fall is not sudden

After receiving multiple emails, we put up a post warning potential Gearbest customers of what is going on at the company. We also sent a couple of emails to Gearbest and didn’t get any response. Now, the worse we feared has happened, Gearbest’s website on all facets is finally down. The online store website is completely inactive as of the time of this report. The home page, products link, special sales, promotion, EVERYTHING is gone. This has been going on for many days now.

A customer confirmed to us that after ordering a smartwatch a few months ago, he no longer have access to the website. This is really sad for customers that have active orders with the company.

We tried a lot of options to get the Gearbest website to work but to no avail. We cleared browser cache, cookies and even changed the IP address of the computer. However, the result remains the same. In addition, we deactivated all antivirus and cleared DNS cache but Gearbest’s website is still inaccessible.

However, I just tried to log into an affiliate account that I have abandoned for over two years and found out that it’s still active. However, when you click on the product adverts on the affiliate page, it is completely inactive.

Apparently, the company did not even inform its affiliate marketers of the collapse of the store. The affiliate page has a “latest news” sub-section. There is no mention of the collapse of the website and all its product links.

In any case, we’re still trying to get in touch with the store officials and try to find out what’s really happening.