I am in the market to purchase a
Canon Digital Rebel XTi. Like any self-proclaimed nerd, I looked to the internet to find the best deal avaliable. I googled the name of the camera and saw a sponsored link for Expresscameras.com. They had a phenomenal price for the camera at $399. This was almost $300 less than Amazon.com’s price. Also in the Google search I came across Bestpricecameras.com at a similar price of $459. Bestpricecameras.com advertises all over the internet, including the popular
Lifehacker.com. There are even fake rating sites saying how wonderful Bestpricecameras.com is as a store. After checking major sites like
Newegg.com and
Ritzcamera.com, I kept coming back to the two previously mentioned sites. I was very tempted by the low price but was slightly hesitant to pull the trigger.
Something did not feel right to me about the two sites offering the camera at such a deep discount, especially since the best deal I found on
Slickdeals.net was for over $600. Since I had never heard of either website, a friend recommended that I take a look at
Resellerratings.com, which rates online merchants on a score from 0 to 10. I typed in Bestpricecameras.com and saw that it was ranked 0.2 out of 10. Ouch!
It turns out that both sites, Expressecameras.com and Bestpricecameras.com are ‘bait and switch’ operations. According to posts on Resellerratings.com, they lure you in with a deal too good to be true. Once they receive your order online, they send you an e-mail asking you to call a sales representative, who then tries to convince you to buy overpriced, made-up accessories. If you do not agree to the accessories, they become belligerent and still charge your credit cards. If you do agree to buy the phantom accessories, they don’t even send you the right items and also overcharge you.
I always assumed that Google monitored the sites that they took ads from to make sure they were legit. I was surprised to learn otherwise. Resellerratings.com saved me from dealing with the headache of canceling my credit card and having fradulent charges. One tip to consider while shopping is to use the Resellerratings.com Firefox extension
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January 5th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Good thing you did your homework and checked Resellerratings.com. Your wife would have been really pissed off if you spent $400 on a camera which you never received.
December 18th, 2007 at 1:38 am
I was looking for a XTi as well and off course was tempted to order through those sites. I got careful when I actually looked for a physical address of the company and realized that the box showing the’customer service contact number’ looked very similar on all of these sites. So I decided to call some of the numbers and ask a few questions…. Most of them were just busy (No online customer support would have a queue busy unless the line was down).
Finally - one one of the numbers, after a bad quality call queue recording, I was transferred to an agent. There I received a short - ’snot available’ for an answer and was in the process of asking about backorder, when the rep simply hang up on me.
I could tell by the way the call was handled that this was not a serious retailer.
Red flag: No physical address, no actual customer service…… Buyer Beware!!!