Flipyard Warranty and Returns Explained: 12 Months of Cover, 7 Days to Change Your Mind

Warranty terms are usually written to be technically accurate and practically useless. This page is the opposite attempt: a straight explanation of what happens if something goes wrong with a device you bought from us, written so you can make a decision without a lawyer.

Start with the headline. Every device sold by Flipyard carries a 12-month warranty, and that warranty is serviced in the UAE. Both halves of that sentence matter. Twelve months is four times the thirty-day guarantee typical of marketplace sellers and considerably longer than the ninety days common in the refurbished trade. Serviced in the UAE means that if something fails, you deal with a local team, and your device does not go into a container bound for another country while you wait. In a market where an enormous amount of refurbished stock is imported with warranty terms that are theoretically valid and practically unusable, this is the difference between cover and the appearance of cover.

The warranty applies equally to every device and every grade. A Fair-grade phone gets exactly the same twelve months as a Superb-grade one, because grading describes cosmetic condition and has nothing to do with functional reliability. Every unit passes the same 47-point inspection regardless of what it looks like, so it would make no sense to cover them differently.

What is covered is hardware failure under normal use. If a component that passed inspection stops working properly while you are using the device as intended, that is ours to fix. In practice that means things like a display developing a fault, a speaker or microphone failing, charging ports that stop reliably charging, buttons that stop responding, biometric sensors such as Face ID or a fingerprint reader failing, cameras that stop focusing or producing correct images, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radios failing, and battery failure as distinct from gradual decline. If the device simply stops doing something it was verified to do, you are covered.

What is not covered is equally important, and we would rather say it clearly than bury it. Accidental damage is not covered: drops, cracked screens, bent frames, crushed laptops. Liquid damage is not covered, which in this climate includes pool water, sea water and the condensation that follows taking a device from a cold car into August humidity, so treat every device as water-resistant at best rather than waterproof. Normal battery wear is not covered; all lithium batteries lose capacity with cycles, and a gradual decline over a year is expected behaviour rather than a fault, though a battery that fails outright or degrades abnormally fast is a different matter and is covered. Damage caused by third-party repair is not covered, so if you open a device or take it to an unauthorised repair shop, cover ends there. Software issues that are not hardware faults, including problems caused by apps, operating system updates or user configuration, sit outside warranty, though we will usually help you sort them out anyway. Theft and loss are not covered, and cosmetic wear that accumulates while you own the device is not covered, because that is simply use.

Making a claim should be straightforward. Contact our support team with your order number and a clear description of what the device is doing, including photos or a short video where the fault is visible. That evidence genuinely speeds things up, because it often lets us identify the problem before the device reaches us. We will confirm whether the issue is covered and arrange for the device to come to us. Once it arrives, we diagnose, then repair, replace or refund depending on what is wrong and what is available. Before you send anything, back up your data and sign out of your accounts, particularly iCloud or your Google account, since a device still locked to your account cannot be worked on. Note your IMEI or serial number for your own records.

Separately from the warranty, there is the 7-day return window on eligible orders. This exists for a different reason. The warranty is for things that break. The return window is for the possibility that the device is simply not what you wanted. Photographs and grade descriptions are good, but they are not the same as holding a device, and we would rather take a return than have someone spend a year with a phone they quietly regret.

Use that week properly. Charge the device fully and run it through a normal day rather than an unusually light one. Restore your backup and install the apps you actually use. Take photos indoors and outside in daylight. Make calls and listen to the other person's voice quality. Pair your headphones and your car. On a laptop, install your real working software and leave it unplugged for a full day to see what the battery really delivers. If the device is going to disappoint you, it will do so within that week, which is exactly the point.

To qualify for a return, the device needs to come back in the condition it arrived in, with its accessories and packaging, and without new damage. That last point is the only one that ever causes friction, so it is worth being direct: a return is for a device you have evaluated, not one you have dropped. Keep the box until you are sure. Sign out of all accounts and disable any find-my or activation lock features before sending it back, because a locked device cannot be accepted for processing.

Refunds go back the way the money came in. Card payments are refunded to the original card, and the time it takes to appear depends on your bank rather than on us, typically a matter of days. Cash on delivery orders are refunded by bank transfer to an account you nominate. Buy-now-pay-later purchases through Tabby or Tamara are refunded through the provider, which then adjusts or cancels your remaining instalments. This is the part people most often worry about, so to be clear: if you return a device you bought in instalments, you do not keep paying for it. The refund is processed to the provider and your plan is settled accordingly. Because a third party is involved, BNPL refunds can take slightly longer to reflect than a straight card refund, and if you have already paid instalments those amounts come back to you.

A note on exchanges. If the problem is the grade rather than the device — you ordered Fair and would prefer Good, or you want to move up a storage tier — talk to us rather than simply returning it. Handling it as an exchange is usually faster and simpler than a return followed by a fresh order, and it avoids you waiting on a refund before you can buy again.

Underneath all of this is a fairly simple position. Selling refurbished technology only works if the buyer believes the seller will still be there after the money has changed hands. A 47-point inspection tells you what we found before shipping. A 12-month UAE warranty tells you what happens if something we missed appears later. A 7-day return window tells you that you are not trapped by a decision made from photographs. Together they are the reason buying a refurbished device should feel no riskier than buying a new one — and if you ever need to use any of them, that is not an inconvenience to us. It is the thing we said we would do.