UPDATE: I guess this post reached someone higher up at Baseus and I got the following message:
I have agreed to take the replacement and refund, but the blog post stays with this update.
tl;dr: Baseus does not honor any warranty claims and resorts to shady tactics to avoid accountability. This applies to their official store and authorized sellers.
Save your time and money, do not buy Baseus Products.
Baseus is a Chinese lifestyle brand that makes some good products and does great marketing for those products. I was impressed with their 120w GaN charger, as it would mean I will have less charging bricks to deal with and plug in to the wall socket. The charger looked good, had good reviews and came with a 1 year warranty (this point is very important), so I pulled the trigger and purchased it from their official store on AliExpress in November 2020. It got delivered early December 2020.
Fast Forward to May 2021 (5 months later), my laptop which was plugged into the Baseus 120w GaN charger stopped charging and I got a strong burning smell coming from the charger. I immediately unplugged it. My charger was dead and my string of misfortunes with Baseus began.
I contacted the “Official” Baseus store on AliExpress where I bought the charger and requested a replacement as the charger was still under warranty. The response I got was that they can “give some discount on the next order”.
The response from the store didn’t sit well with me so I went to Baseus Support website (https://support.baseus.com) and started a warranty claim process. After waiting a few days I finally got a response.
Okay. Baseus support basically told me to contact the store on AliExpress which has already refused to honor the warranty claim and offered me a discount on my next purchase, which is not acceptable. I replied with the screenshot of the conversation on AliExpress, and informed the Baseus support team that the seller is refusing to honor the warranty.
At this point I was hoping they would see that I have exhausted the option of contacting the seller directly and I am reaching out to the official support team to provide a reasonable solution i.e. honor the warranty. Sadly I was in for more disappointment.
Clearly something was amiss. I thought I had ordered from the official Baseus store on AliExpress. So I went to double check on the Baseus support warranty page (https://support.baseus.com/warranty.html). Sure enough, the “BASEUS Officialflagship Store” is listed as an official store on AliExpress.
I replied back with the above screenshot and got the following response.
At this point, I gave up on “Official” Baseus support and sent the following reply, pointing out that Baseus is supposed to hold their authorized sellers accountable, instead of shifting blame.
As a last resort, I contacted the AliExpress seller again to point out that they are the authorized seller as per official Baseus support and responsible for after-sales service and honoring the warranty.
This time they made up a new excuse, saying they only offer 2 months warranty and cannot help me. Sorry Baseus, you are not seeing another cent from me.
Finally I gave up and decided to write up this post to warn others who are considering Baseus products.
Save your time and money, do not buy Baseus products. They will lie, shift blame and ultimately leave you with a broken product and promise.