Two more online shoppers who bought electronic equipment have discovered that the delivery chain is not completely reliable. Once again, a box of Boing has showed up instead of a phone and bags of salt replaced two laptops.

Gerardo Nava says he purchased a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9S cell phone on Amazon but when the package arrived last Wednesday he opened it to find nothing but a carton of Boing apple juice. A cell phone case he purchased at the same time arrived without any problem. 

When Nava contacted Amazon the company said it would return the 5,048 pesos (US $238) he spent on the phone on the condition that he send the juice carton back to Amazon via DHL to verify his story.

The same thing happened to Salvador Gómez, who purchased an iPhone SE from the Sears online store but received a box of Boing guava-flavored juice instead. The mix-up went viral after he posted a photo of the carton inside the shipping box to his Twitter account. 

Gómez has since been reimbursed.

A third such complaint appeared on Twitter on September 1. A man posted a video showing a bag of salt inside a box that was supposed to contain a laptop.

After he ordered two laptops from Mercado Libre the shipments arrived at his home in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, on August 31. One box was sent from Chiapas, the other from Mexico City.

When he opened the first box, he found a bag of Mar de Cortés-brand salt, which he says is only sold in Sonora.

Anticipating that the same thing might happen with the second box, he filmed himself opening it. It too contained nothing but salt.

The man contacted Mercado Libre who said that they had indeed shipped the laptops, leading the man to believe that the switch may have been made once the packages arrived at the FedEx warehouse in Sonora. 

“The thing in common with both is that they have the same type of brown tape, they have the same salt, the same appearance, the same brand and it seems incongruous to me that if one comes from Tuxtla, Chiapas, and the other from Mexico City, that they would contain the same salt,” he says. 

He recommends that people who shop online film themselves opening the package.

“Hopefully these parcel companies make an effort to take or further improve security measures … to avoid these cases,” he said.

In 2019, 18 million Mexicans bought products online, Profeco reports, and 9% said they had problems with their purchases.

Source: El Financiero (sp), El Universal (sp)