purchased of iPhone 14 BUT ensure you push for tourist VAT tax refund
We purchased an iPhone 14 pro 512mb from Cellular world to replace a damaged phone during our trip. Stock info was available via WhatsApp chat. We ideally wanted silver or space grey iPhone 13 mini 512mb; but went to the store anyway to double check & their stock info was accurate. They had very limited options & only had the entry model iPhone 14 128mb , pro 512, or pro max 1 TB available (all only in purple colour, which looks like navy blue). Farhi, our salesperson was initially fine, helping us check and do basic phone setup, & put on the tempered glass protective screen. However, when we asked him about foreigner tax refund (VAT refund), he said this was not available. When we got to the airport to leave Indonesia, we saw that Cellularworld participates in foreigners tax refund for purchases. The refund amount was substantial so we contacted Cellularworld’s WhatsApp service to sort the VAT documents quickly & ask them to organise motorbike courier to meet us at the airport in time to catch our flight . The process was super stressful but we were thankful that the WhatsApp customer service helped resolve the issue and sort it all out, just in time.
However, we were annoyed with being misinformed about the VAT refund entitlement in the store, as it caused us great stress, inconvenience and potentially a lot of money as well (refund amount was around 2.7M INR!) Cellularworld need to train their store sales teams on the tax refund process for foreign visitors. This would benefit their business, having happy customers being serviced with correct information.
Therefore we rate 2* to the store floor sales staff, but an
Amazing 5* star to the WhatsApp customer support that helped resolve the issue quickly so we could get our money due and catch our international flight!! Further we were asked to pay for the motorbike courier & felt we shouldn’t have had to, due to the error on Cellularworld’s part, but didn’t feel it was worth arguing for the sake of 35k INR for the Moto courier vs 2.7M for the tax refund.