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The featured story in the November 2004 issue of PC World was titled "Best Places to Buy." They surveyed nearly 3,500 readers and shopped 15 stores and sites to come up with ratings for buying advice, pricing and rebates, selection, and return policy for technology products. I eagerly started reading because, I, like most people want to get the most for my money and wanted to know where I could get the best deals. Boy, did I end up disappointed.
Here are the stores they rated: CDW, Dell, Apple, CompUSA, Gateway, HPShopping, Staples, Best Buy, Circuit City, and Sony. Ever heard of these guys? Of course you have. They are the companies that are plastered on magazine ads, junk mail, and on TV. After reading their first table of all the stores and their ratings, I was amazed. I shop for tech products constantly. I post great deals at the best web stores on this very website. Yet, only 2, or maybe 3, of the stores they rated have ever had deals posted on my site, or any deals site for that matter.
If you visit my Hot Deals page, you will most often see deals from Amazon, Buy.com, Newegg, ZipZoomFly, and J&R. I'm probably forgetting a couple, but you get the point. Why do I consistently list deals from these sites? Because they consistently have the very best deals. They are large, well-established sites that offer free or reasonable shipping, detailed product descriptions with pictures, and most have customer reviews.
How could a magazine like PC World leave out these sites when doing their review? I sent a letter to the editor to find out. Here's his response:
We wish we could have covered more online stores, but we wanted the story to focus on buying advice, so we limited ourselves primarily to national chains and a few large online retailers. We have covered NewEgg and similar online stores in previous articles and will do so again.
If you're doing an article on "Best places to buy", shouldn't you include the ones that "those in the know" would tell their friends to buy from? I don't buy that response at all. The excuse that they focused on buying advice is bogus on two counts. The article didn't focus on this at all. It gave equal weight to buying advice, pricing and rebates, selection, and return policy. Second, almost none of the web stores they reviewed offer good buying advice. To these stores, buying advice involves telling you that you need the newest product, and then selling you overpriced accessories to go with it. CircuitCity.com was one of its lowest rated rated web stores, but at least it has an abundance of customer reviews on the products. I love stores that have customer reviews. Who is better to give you advice than someone who has bought and used the product?
There are probably many reasons the author of the PC World article left out some of the very best places to buy tech products online. She could have been ignorant. Evidence of this is including CDW in the list. CDW is much more geared to service businesses, and their prices show it. Regular consumers should never shop there. Second, she could have been lazy. She may not know much about buying tech products online, so she chose to only rate the stores she's heard of. Finally, she may have only included the stores that are major advertisers in the magazine (almost all of them are).
I'm not saying you should never shop at the stores PC World rated. All that I am saying is that better prices can be found elsewhere from great web stores. Before buying anything, always check out the stores I listed above as well as my Hot Deals page or another deals site like Ben's Bargains or Dealnews.
