Slashdot Mirror
Online Retailer Fraud?
Capt Gerkin asks: "While debugging a hardware problem on my system, I had the opportunity to take a good long look at my RAM chips. The DDR memory, that I purchased online two months ago, had some interesting product codes, and the descriptions didn't match with anything at Micron's website. Although I understand they may not publish all memory on their site, it brought up an interesting question for online retail. With the hard return procedures, no name companies and faceless dealers, how often is the product we think we are purchasing really a fake? It would be interesting to find out how many times others have placed orders for something online, only to get something entirely different, instead."
- buy from reputable distributers with good return policies...
- buy from no-name companies with dodgy return policies, and run the risk of getting screwed.
Sometimes peace of mind is worth the extra couple of bucks you'll have to spend.
(by the way, how come this story never made it to the main page???)
It's one with me, anyway. All of my computer geek friends insist on buying their parts from companies listed on PriceWatch because they swear up and down they can get the absolute best prices there. Never mind that sometimes they end up buying parts from joebobschickenshackandcomputerparts.com, and Joe Bob charges three times normal shipping costs to make his money back since he's selling computer parts at ridiculously low prices. Plus, Joe Bob almost ALWAYS has a bizarro, convoluted, screw-the-customer-at-every-turn return policy. I'm all about being frugal, but as a previous poster said a few extra dollars is worth my peace of mind. Are you really saving that much money when you risk getting crap merchandise that can't be returned?
I'm trying to get my boyfriend to stop shopping at these places, but he's gotten lucky and not been screwed the few times he's shopped there, so he continues to do it. I'll stick with the bigger name places for my parts, thankyouverymuch.
There's only two songs in me, and I just wrote the third. --TMBG
On the positive side, several purchases from Insight were perfect with good support when a video card fried itself. TC Computers was always good for motherboards and what not (and now owned by Insight). Buy.com and Amazon have also been good to me. So on and so on for about two dozen purchases.
I think the summary here is bad experiences with big (and expensive) on line retailers, less than 10%. Bad experiences with small, fly-by-night retailers, more than 70%. Gee, you really do get what you pay for.
So in other words, you go out of your way to avoid crappy, disreuputable vendors to avoid being defrauded, then happily commit an act of fraud against an honest merchant.
You're a swell guy.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I paid about $5 more for some 128MB chips yesterday. Oh, and another little bit for tax. Because I know the vendor, and they don't give me grief on returns. I also get to look at the product prior to purchase. (Was looking for a PCI modem with a controller on it. IOW, not a WinModem. Anybody know of an internal PCI controller based modem?)
Heck, one time *I* fried some memory. I knew it, they knew it, but they RMA'ed it anyway. Support your local vendor. For an extra 10% or so, it's well worth it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I just built my brand new computer entirely from stores listed on pricewatch, with exception of my monitor. The trick is to actually know what your buying and not just buy RAM in the size you want. i.e. I didn't go to pricewatch and search for 512 MB Ram. I did my research on RAM manufacturers and decided on a couple that had good reviews. Then I went and searched for those specific ones and made the comparisons on prices between those. I also look for things like the CAS rating on the RAM, if it's not listed I move on.
Anyway, the trick is to know exactly what you are buying. Sure, I could have gotten that 512MB DIMM for $40 less than I paid, but that was a 3 CAS No name brand. You get what you pay for, don't go for the cheapest, go for the deal!
BTW, the only reason that I didn't buy the monitor through price watch is that the prices can't be competitive. Monitors are so big/heavy that shipping is very expensive, so I bought it locally.
- AMW
You can also see merchants' ratings on Yahoo's service, as entered by other purchasers. And the fact that you're going to have an opportunity to affect their ranking after the sale usually means that sellers bend over backwards to help you if there's been any kind of a problem.
One of the other great things about Yahoo's service is that you can track all your orders (past and present) in one place. This is a godsend if you're like me and you often have 5-6 orders outstanding.