2BAD: Why you should never purchase a smartphone on 2GUD

My experience with buying a refurbished smartphone on 2GUD.com and why you shouldn’t make that mistake.

2GUD is a refurbished products marketplace launched by Flipkart in 2018

Background

A friend of mine recently lost his smartphone while commuting towards my home. And by lost, I mean stolen. You’re probably reading this on your smartphone, so you know this is a real tragedy. We did what we could: register a complaint at the nearest police station. After months of using a feature phone as penance, my friend decided to spend his hard-earned money on the best thing he could afford: a second-hand mid-range smartphone.

Happy with the experience of my elder brother purchasing a smartphone on 2GUD, I recommended it to my friend. I wish I’d known that the deals on that site would actually be too good (to be true).

Looks like a good deal, eh?

I mean, look at the deal they’re offering. A phone that used to cost ₹15,999 for as low as ₹7,440? You’d be crazy to give up on such a good deal. If recycled phones are so cheap, why buy a new one and contribute to the world’s fastest growing waste problem?

We couldn’t find any red flags at the time:

• My elder brother’s experience was a first-hand testimony of how it’s recommended to buy a product on 2GUD.
• 2GUD is powered by Flipkart. Heck, both sites use the same account for logging in.

We were aware of the 10 days replacement policy and the fact that both 2GUD and Flipkart don’t accept returns on smartphone purchases. But it didn’t seem like a red flag at the time. We thought:

Hey, that’s only to remove non-genuine buyers and prevent abuse of the service.

By the time we experienced what we did, it was 2LATE.

We placed the order on 14th August, only to receive the shipment on 22nd August. Never mind the delay in delivery time or the lack of excitement when the smartphone finally arrived. Guess what happened when we unboxed the shipment?

We received a MicroUSB charger for a smartphone that supported Type-C. My friend needed the Type-C charger because nobody at his home had it. Surely you’re thinking, it’s not that big of a deal. And I agree with you. Nor is the fact the phone had more scratches than advertised. So what’s all the fuss about?

I did what anyone would do. I tried to contact support. Tried being the keyword. I was able to successfully navigate through their Help Center an reach a place where I could talk to a real person. I was presented with two options: Call Me Back or Email Us.

I tried to request a callback but this is what happened:

So I tried again. Unsuccessfully. Eventually, I decided to go with the advertised response time of 24 hours and I sent them an email. I was able to get the message through!

I also decided to create a replacement request at the same time and even that got approved within seconds. I consoled my friend, saying:

We’ve waited this long, a few more days won’t hurt.

The Tragedy

After being updated as Out for Delivery, the delivery guy calls my friend and denies replacement without ever coming to his residence. I suggested him to go to the nearest Ekart warehouse in hopes that better sense would prevail. In case you didn’t know, Ekart is just another business owned by Flipkart. He travelled for an hour to reach there only to learn that his efforts were futile. I told him:

Let’s not loose our patience yet.

It’d been six days and I’d still not received any human response to my emailed query. So in a desperate attempt to talk to a human, I called a Flipkart representative. Our 23-minute conversation summed up to this:

The representative couldn’t do anything about 2GUD orders as 2GUD and Flipkart are different marketplaces.

My best bet was to cancel the replacement request and create a new one. Or contact again using email in hopes of a response, because, the Call Me Back “feature” still didn’t work after repeated attempts. So I created a new replacement request. This time, as it was already 6 days since the product was first delivered, a “technician” was to visit my friend’s residence to approve the replacement request. We assumed it was only to prevent those system-abusers who got a product replaced simply because they didn’t like it.

The technician visited my friend’s location and acknowledged the fact the he had indeed received a incompatible charger. But it was a few minutes after the technician left that I discovered on the 2GUD website that the replacement had been rejected. Apparently, the technician had suggested my friend to contact support. Look at you, laughing at my friend’s misery.

So contacting support is what I tried to do. Harder this time. And never giving up paid off. In case anyone’s facing a similar issue, here’s how I was able to register a Call Me Back request:

I was not able to add any value to the Phone Number field, so, after many attempts, I discovered that the URL contained a query parameter customerPhone which was conveniently empty because my Flipkart account used my email address, not phone number. I manually added a value there. Still got the Request Failed error and still kept trying until finally it worked and I got a message saying someone would call me back within 15 mins.

Turned out to be an hour but that’s fine. When I finally talked to the 2GUD representative, the outcome of that 31-minute call in which I suggested that a charger replacement would be okay too could be summed up in just one line:

The representative understood and sympathised with me but all she or anyone above her could do was create another replacement request and schedule another technician visit because “procedures” needed to be followed.

Having exhausted all other possibilities, we resigned to the fact that all we could do is wait for another technician visit. So we did.

This time, the Jeeves “technician” offered another “solution”. (Fun fact: Jeeves is yet another Flipkart business.) He suggested that my friend should buy a MicroUSB to Type-C adapter which retails for as low as ₹20. But this was no grounds to request a device replacement. No surprise here, the replacement was rejected.

So as of today (1st Sept. 2019), we’ve created what is probably the last replacement request we’d be able to create before the replacement period expires. Here’s what the order page looks like:

Looks okay, considering what it feels like:

So here I am, writing this Medium story, because as a Tumblr quote once said:

TL;DR

Do not order a smartphone on 2GUD. Unless:

• You’re okay dealing with sellers who don’t want anything to do with you once they’ve made the sale.
• You’re okay with not receiving any reply to any number of emails you send to 2GUD.
• You’re okay with going through 2MUCH hassle and still not receiving a friggin’ charger that works for your smartphone.
• You’re okay with broken promises.

If you reached here, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read this story. I’d love to hear your constructive comments. I’ll post more updates when I have them.