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Cameras Online? How The Shysters Work
earlylate writes "How do certain photo and electronics dealers thrive despite widely-circulated warnings by unhappy customers? According to a new investigative website "many apparently separate and competing dealers are actually jointly owned and run" and "go to great lengths to conceal their locations and management." Further, some comparison-shopping sites "are in effect marketing partners with their affiliates," the very dealers they rate. There's a contest based on the suspicious "flood of similar, glowing reviews some dealers receive," as well as links to several sources of information and advice for the careful online shopper."
A lot of people don't realise the the big "price deal search engines" such as Kelkoo and Dealtime also return results based on the amount the retailers they link to have paid for a higher position. You'll often find you can dig up better deals just using Google. However, I know that at least one of the biggest UK online electronics retailers derives the highest percentage of paying click-throughs from Dealtime (that is, people referred by Dealtime, who then go on to actually buy a product). The Dealtime referrals actually result in more sales than people browsing their site to find stuff. So the idea/scam works well...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I'd rather pay a little more and know that I'm buying from someone I can trust. So what if I can save a few bucks if I'm not sure I'm going to get exactly what I paid for? Sure I look for deals but it's a matter of balancing that against buying from someone reputable.
Bradley Holt
You mean to say that I shouldn't spend $100s based on the opinions of anonymous and untrusted (to me) sources.
I tell you, I'm shocked.
You'll be telling me next that the editorial in trade newspapers is somehow related to the advertising.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
When it comes to expensive, and frequently fragile electronics, always buy local. This should be a no brainer. The on-line prices are too good to be true simply because the on-line retailers know they won't have to deal with the customer service part.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
I tend to pick a reputable retailer I've already done trade with, and if the price is more than say 10% different I just assume it's a scam and ignore it unless I know someone else personally who's traded with them. Even if the difference is less than 10% I still prefer to buy from companies I or my friends have dealt with. I may miss some good bargains that way, but I've never been scammed...
Game dev and music blog
Use common sense. here's what I tell everyone that asks.
1) only buy from reputable sites. this has been going on since computer shopper days. its even more true today.
2) I only use my American Express (AMEX). I can't tell you how many times AMEX has helped with fraudulent charges, merchants that don't deliver etc. AMEX is expensive and a pain in the ass for mechants to sign up. If they are not willing to do that, than I won't buy. I will pay a slight premium for sights that take AMEX. It's worth it.
If I'd done both these when I first got online in the 90s I would have saved myself a lot of grief.
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
Most of those have been around for a long time. and the places with the glowing reviews always feel a bit suspicious when you dig deeper on them.
The fun part is that it highlights something that most people ignore. They will not think twice buying from someon on ebay with a 1000+ rating yet it is really simple to BUY rating points. (hint: search ebay for cupons) If you spend lots of money on something online and the price is too good to be true, be ready to lose your cash.
BTW: if it's less than $1000.00 you are pretty much hosed. I lost $500.00 to a scammer auto parts dealer on the east coast (read my blog for the name and location) and after getting my lawyer poised and finding out how much to bring the small claims suit against them It was much cheaper to simply drop it as it would have cost me $1500.00 to sue him... These scammers know this and that is why they rarely venture over that $1000.00 line.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Review sites for electronics and the like are chock full of super-cheesy, almost non-sensical reviews. If you look at reviews, and most of them consist of one or two lines of things that don't really matter, then it's a bogus review. There are so many of them, it becomes what I call "Surround and drown" fake reviews. Firefighters know that if you surround a fire with enough hoses, you can drown it sooner or later. These review sites have the same process, where all negative real reviews are drowned out by the fake ones.
"Timely shipping!" That one is my favorite fake review. Um, you ship via UPS or FedEx Ground. It's 3 days, no matter how you slice it. How can it not be timely?
"Great Customer Service!" Another of my favorites. The person hasn't done anything but buy something, in all likely hood. There hasn't been any customer service up to that point.
"Easy to use website ordering!" Um, yeah, that's the first thing I look for when buying electronics over the web.
If the review doesn't bring up any points, or doesn't provoke any honest thoughts, it is probably fake. Read the actual negative reviews.
Besides, why does this surprise anyone? The same thing can be said for almost every PC/XBox, PS/PS2 magazine or website. They all get such pats on the back from the companies they review, that they don't have an honest review in them. It's the equivelent of letting a lifelong, die-hard Rolling Stones fan review one of their concerts. The review is going to read "Dude, they Rawked!", even if Keith Richards was so stoned he forgot to play his guitar.
I have a feeling this sort of scam will disappear in due time.
You're new to this life, aren't you? The birth rate in the sucker demographics category is way too high for these scams to disappear anywhere within the forseable future.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
One of the assumptions is that all participants have complete, truthful information. Obviously, that would be the end of any and all scammers.
That is NEVER an assumption -- in fact I believe the counter-fact to be true. In a free market, every transaction is based on the assumption that both parties feel they are profiting from the transaction. This case is based on the risk versus reward idea. The bigger the reward is, the bigger one assumes the risk is. If Camera W123 sells locally for $499, at Amazon for $449, and John's Photo Shop sells it for $379, you're gaining a huge reward. If you jump on that price, you're accepting a risk. It is personal greed that leads people to buy from deep discounters, and they have to acknowledge that there is always a risk in making a purchase. The reason many people buy locally for more money is to lower their risk.
The problem is, of course, that our governments, pretty much no matter which one you choose, are not exactly breeding pools or good examples of honesty and integrity
This is true -- government tends to be run by scammers and shysters, in my experience.
What you're advocating is putting government in charge of markets -- the same government that is never transparent, hides information "legally" and has zero oversight except for a vote once every 4 years or so. I advocate dumping the government provisions and letting the new Internet information sharing structure take over. Now, we have instant voting based on consumer demand. If a lot of consumers get duped by a company, we'll soon have the ability to broadcast that information over many different sources.
I'd like to see an SMS server where you can message a number "JohnPhotoShop.com" and have it return "50 positives, 300 negatives, 15 neutrals" I believe this will happen, very soon, as Google and many other companies are trying to gain brand share by providing free SMS services. I use FBOWEB.COM to track all my flights and used the free PDA version of the site for a few months. Now I purchased a subscription as the site is really worth the information I've received -- and it is always more accurate than what the airlines provide.
I don't think government has protected us from scammers, ever. If anything, the platforms made by government are only used by scammers to find new loopholes (as is seen in the New York Photo scam that has been going on for 20 years). Now that information is available to EVERYONE, there is no excuse to getting scammed. Even some posts on slashdot today show that people didn't research the too-good-to-be-true pricing, and got scammed. Greed: you get what you deserve.
There is one at least that is a reputable dealer, B&H Photo. They are a massive store and sell still and video cameras from consumer up to extremely high end pro. They do audio gear, consumer and pro too. Of course because their are reputable their prices are good, but nothing special. However they are worth checking. I got my Yamaha reciever from them. Yamaha requires their recievers be purchased from a license dealer to honour warantee. All the local ones wanted full MSRP, however Yamaha lists B&H as a licensed dealer. Checked with them and it was much cheaper, even with $50 shipping.
So there ARE reputable dealers in New York, you just need to be careful. One thing to check is to see if they are authorized dealers. You can't fake something like that (Yamaha does the listing on their own site) and that's not something that a scammy, fly-by-night is going to do since the company wouldn't license them anyhow. If they are an authorized dealer for the companies that do that kind of thing, they are probably on the up and up.
But we were talking about electronics here, something Consumer Reports is astonishingly bad at. Their Mac coverage borders on the daftly ignorant. They famously reviewed the PowerPCs as "slow" but accidentally only ran interpreted 68000 programs on them, not the new ones. And they published a survey of virus trends which was so flawed that 17% of OS X users "reported" having a virus on their machines. They reported this as cause for concern, rather than realizing it was a signal that their methodology is flawed. And don't get me started on how little they know about PDAs. I trust CR's car data. But for electronics I look elsewhere. They're incompetent.
I'd like to see an SMS server where you can message a number "JohnPhotoShop.com" and have it return "50 positives, 300 negatives, 15 neutrals"
And soon, there will be 50 competing services of that kind, half of which receive kickbacks from the companies they rate well. How do you choose which service to trust? Maybe a meta-service that rates the info-services? Soon, there will be 50 competing meta-services...
I don't think government has protected us from scammers, ever.
I actually think it has. Not 100%, not ever perfectly and completely. However when I travel on the train and I'm not afraid of robbers, then to be quite honest it's not because I think any of my fellow travellers would stand up and stop them - it's because government has been successful in keeping crime rates at such a level that being robbed is an unlikely event.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The problem with Consumer reports is that the reports and reviews are not written by experts. They are written by consumers, who have no idea what the hell they're dealing with.
Consumer Reports "best buy" computer every year ends up being a Compaq or a Dell or an HP machine. Anyone who knows anything about computers will get a good chuckle out of their rationale for that rating.
I know a guy who has said much the same thing about their ratings of HVAC equipment.
I'd rather have the opinion of an expert than a purposefully ignorant "consumer".
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Mod me down if you must, but the inference that two 'foreigners' at different stores were in cahoots against the shopper - only evidenced by one's use of a walkie-talkie and a language the shopper didn't understand - smacks of racism. I could be wrong, but that's certainly what it seems like based on what was posted.
Paranoid, possibly, but not necessarily racist. The question is whether he would have jumped to the same conclusion that he was not dealing with two independent retailers if the clerk at the first store was the same race as himself, and the clerk at the second store was as well, but bore what might have been a family resemblance to the first clerk, and spoke quietly into the walkie-talkie so that he couldn't hear. I suspect that he would have reacted exactly the same way. Not everything has to be about race.
While I don't know specifically what CR was doing at the time, I can tell you that frequently different standards of quality control are applied rebadged merchandise. For example, when Sears puts their name ('Kenmore') on appliacnes, they want a certain level of quality -- which may be more or less than the manufacturer would normally turn out, depending on the amount of money they want to spend.
Also, reliability reports in CR are and always have been based on quality surveys sent out to (all) subscribers of the magazine.
I think CR gets a bad rap just because they're relatively incompetent at rating computers and electronics.Their automotive coverage has vastly improved in recent years, and they nail the reliability of cars and trucks. And they are the standard benchmark for home appliance reviews. Ultimately, though, CR is just one tool, and can cover only so many products even within one class of appliances. If you're making a major purchase, you should use many tools to find information about it. And you definitely shouldn't discount CR as one of those tools (unless you're buying electronics...).
They are written by consumers, who have no idea what the hell they're dealing with.
You have a beef with CR, fine. That's no reason to go making shit up.
CR has experts do the testing, which is plainly and comprehensively explained along with their testing methodology.