Xiaomi halts Cash on Delivery option for Redmi Note 5 Pro: Here's why

While the Redmi Note 5 Pro is scheduled to go on sale today at 12 pm, Xiaomi has now announced that it is halting the Cash on Delivery (COD) payment option for the upcoming sales of the Redmi Note 5 Pro on Mi.com and Flipkart.

It has often been seen that a lot of people bought Xiaomi smartphones with Cash on Delivery (COD) option and later resell them for a slim profit margin on various marketplaces, creating a shortage of the phone. The company have acknowledged that buying its phones could be excruciating for buyers and in order to help genuine buyers and prohibit the reselling practice, it is temporarily halting COD payment option.

“In order to restrict reselling, we have decided to remove COD payment option for the upcoming sales of Redmi Note 5 Pro on mi.com and Flipkart (only for initial few sales). This would give a better chance to our Mi fans to purchase our products. We have always, and will continue to stringently discourage unauthorized reselling across all our channels,” Xiaomi said in a blog post.

“We have come across some users who have been increasingly rejecting orders upon delivery. This increases the operational cost which makes it really difficult for us to keep our products affordable for all Mi fans. In order to protect the interest of our Mi fans, we have started identifying such suspicious Mi IDs and have put a check on their orders,” said the company in a forum post.

Xiaomi is said to have sold over 3,00,000 units of its newly launched phone, Redmi Note 5 Pro, within the first three minutes of the flash sale. To recall, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro features a 5.99-inch IPS LCD full HD+ display with a resolution of 1080x2160 pixels. Under the hood, the Redmi Note 5 Pro is powered by octa-core Snapdragon 636 chipset paired with 4GB/6GB RAM and 64GB of storage.

The smartphone sports a 12MP+5MP dual rear camera setup and a 20MP front shooter with LED flash and Beautify 4.0. It also comes with Face unlock feature. The phone runs on Android 7.1 Nougat based MIUI 9 out-of-the-box. The handset draws its power from a 4,000mAh battery and comes with dual SIM 4G VoLTE capabilities.

The Redmi Note 5 is priced at Rs 9,999 for 3GB RAM/32GB of storage variant, whereas the 4GB RAM/64GB storage variant will cost around Rs 11,999. As for the Redmi Note 5 Pro, it comes with a price tag of Rs 13,999 for 4GB RAM, while the 6GB RAM version will costs Rs 16,999.