ELLIOTT: Beware of Dot-Com Con

• What's elliott?
• About elliott
• Contact us

t o p i c s

• Business
• Commentary
• Destinations
• Help
• Leisure
• Technology
• Vault

• Read back issues. Like what you see? Now you can become an underwriter.

a l s o

• Referring sites
• Public relations
• Visit Tripso
• Home

s e a r c h

• Find a story.

Beware of Dot-Com Con
The Travel Technologist · January 17, 2002

They say the camera never lies. But the camera salesman, that's another story - especially if you buy online.

I made this disturbing discovery while researching a series of columns about videography for mobile travelers. As the spring travel season approaches and you consider purchasing a new camcorder for the road, this information can make a huge difference in the amount of money you pay for your new unit. And what you end up getting for it.

My experience of shopping online and offline for a camera started fairly normally. I visited newsgroups like rec.video.production and websites such as CNET.com and ZDNet to find the best camcorder (you'll have to wait for next week to find out which one I picked) and then began pricing it.

That's when the fun began.

The first thing I noticed is that the manufacturer's list price was hundreds, even thousands of dollars higher than what some of the websites were charging. It made me suspicious.

MySimon.com offered a listing of each merchant and price for comparison purposes, which gave me a reasonably good list of websites to check. It also offered merchant ratings that were almost completely outdated. (If it's any consolation, Bizrate.com's merchant scoring system was only slightly better, with many stores still in the "unrated" category.)

It turns out that finding the cheapest rates online was the easy part of this exercise. Pinning these elusive merchants down about the product was practically impossible. Here's an excerpt from my first phone call:

"I'm calling about the [camcorder]."
"Yeah."
"Can you tell me what it comes with?"
"Yeah. It's the whole box. Everything."
"What about the warranty?"
"Yeah."
"Are you an authorized dealer?"
"I'm not gonna answer that question."
"Why not?"
Click.

In subsequent phone calls, a phone representative for another reseller tried to talk me into buying a more expensive "version" of the same camcorder. "It be better. It be coming with manual. Other camcorder not coming with manual, that." he said in extremely broken English. Selling something that was supposed to ship with the product in the first place struck me as less than honest, so I moved on.

Other phone reps tried to throw in a manufacturer's warranty at an extra charge. They tried to sell me a "reconditioned" model and a gray market camcorder-a unit from a questionable source that the manufacturer probably wouldn't service. I called nearly every online store on the list. After a while I had to conclude that most of these merchants were liars, shifty dot-com cons that preyed on innocent consumers.

Here's my own checklist designed to ferret out a dishonest online merchant:

Obscenely low prices. You know the old saying, "if it's too good to be true…?" Applies to camcorders in a big way. If the difference between the manufacturer's price and the merchant's is more than $500, don't bother clicking over to the site.
Oh, that's extra. Warranties, manuals, and batteries should come with the unit. Same for rechargers and cables that hook up to your PC. How stupid do these people think we are?
Refuse to answer the question. If a sales person can't answer your question via e-mail or on the phone, or refuses to, then run, don't walk. It means they've got something to hide. It probably also means they're trying to pull a fast one.
Can't answer the question. What does a completely unintelligible voice with no basic command of the English language on the other end of the line tell you about a business? It tells you that it doesn't care about customers. It's as simple as that.

Once you've comparison-shopped, I suspect you'll find that the big brand names offer the best overall bargains. Even the manufacturers don't stack up poorly once you factor in customer service, reliability, and straightforwardness. In my next column, I'll reveal which camcorder I bought and where I went to buy it.

See you next week.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on SmarterLiving.com.