Thanks Plinkie, I appreciate the help.

I have to admit, I'm skeptical of the whole thing. For example, I can't the last time I saw a thread with responses from three different people sporting the classification of "newbie."

I'm just trying to lay the options out.
I know that I'm a newbie on this site (I don't even know how that is figured out...even though I've been registered since last July pretty much just lurking).

Anyways, if you think the site is somewhat shady and that doesn't sit well with you don't do it. Shopping for anything online is inherently risky because you don't have a B&M shop to go back to if something goes wrong. The extra buyer protecting is quite a plus with these kind of cards though.
The good thing about the extra protection is that the extra protection from Amex is based on manufacturer warranty. So if you get an actual "legit" product and it doesn't work out you have something to fall back on.

I hear you plinkey, and thanks for not taking my "newbie" comment personally. Obviously, I was addressing the earlier post that another person asked for "full disclosure." Adding it all up, it just looked weird.

Thanks again for your help.

- Brian

Mavic are in stock, Rolf never were
 

I just got a set of mavic SL3 wheels yesterday, so half your statement is not true. I also checked for Rolf wheels, and they are NOT listed as in stock on the website--perhaps they were a slow in correcting the inventory database.

If you call a seller "dishonest" just because they sometimes are out of stock on an a listed item, then I guess 90% of all bike shops and internet retailers are just as dishonest. Sometimes manufacturers are months late with promised deliveries. The bike business is very seasonal.

Again, has anyone actually PLACED AN ORDER and been screwed out of any money or received an inferior product? It's so easy for a higher-priced competitor to spoof an email address and diss another seller--happens all the time with internet marketing. Ever notice how retailers and politicians complain about Wal-Mart, but customers usually have nice things to say? Folks get jealous when you undersell them, whether its bike wheels or groceries.

I'm a software contractor when I'm not on the bike who also uses osCommerce to sell database and consulting services: osCommerce which by the way is the largest open-systems eCommerce installation in the world--it is not "easier" thant other programs or less secure or ess featured. Like Linux or Firefox, it is open-systems and supported by the user community or non-profit organizations. Cutting a retailer down for using osCommerce is like saying they are dishonest for using Linux or Firefox instead of Microsoft or Windows Explorer, even though many experts say the open-systems are more secure and easier to use than the proprietary.

Seems like those who diss other bike retailers (and use only a random number to describe themselves) also like to cut down other software. They also seem to be pretty poor at using a web browser, where I found the bikecost.com address and phone number (406 area code in Montana) in less than three minutes.

Well, at least you are honest enough to identify yourself as a brick-and-mortar bikeshop owner who feels they are losing business to a lower-priced seller. Folks said almost the same thing when Amazon.com started selling books and CDs for less, or when Google starting giving away email and office software for free.

All those overhead expenses you talk about are important if you are in that business, but why are they so important to the actual bike rider? If they can return the wheel in 30 days to the retailer or in one year to the manufacturer, what is the real difference than a bike shop? With gas prices nowadays, it's almost cheaper to ship something than to drive to the store and back. Can you guarantee every bike shop has the best expertise on everything in the store?

Personally, I shop at my local bike shop for things I can't get on the internet or for specialty items where indeed I do need advice, and I am loyal to one shop. But simply replacing an existing wheel or buying a big-ticket item I've researched extensively, what is the harm?

You cannot simply stop the tide of internet marketing: forcing prices down below retail forces manufacturers to eventually sell directly to internet marketers. Many vendors once said they would never sell their stuff at Wal-Mart, and many bike manufactures said they would never make their wheels in China, but now they do.

We live in an era of global marketing and outsourced labor, where people like to shop online--the includes the world's largest bike retailer, PerformanceBike.com, which started as exclusively online.

Wow, you described many aspects of the very successful business model I used in Australia. Other than skirting import duties, everything I did was perfectly legal. And I had no phone number, address, or return policy.

I can only assume you are addressing my post, but it would be nice if you used the quote feature...


Nothing new. If you knew more about me, or took the time to look at my site, you might have noticed we have 36,000 items online as it is. And no, they're not all "in stock".


I presented them solely as an indication of the costs of running a legitimate business. I would think you would want to do business with a business that operates in cooperation with the mfgr, rather than than a "back door" seller who is nothing more than the online equivalent of a guy in a van, selling gray market product on the street corner.


We have (nice) loaner wheels for our customers. You will not be off your bike while you wait a week or more to have your wheel evaluated for repair or warranty. We keep you riding. And I suggest you stay away from Mavic if you think you can send a wheel bought from these guys to Mavic and get it warranteed. Mavic wouldn't even do one for me without a receipt from the customer, showing it was from a shop that had an agreement with Mavic, and that Mavic had actually sold the wheel to the shop to begin with. Indygreg feels that no matter what, the customer will get taken care of regardless of the channel from which the product was obtained. That used to be true, but more and more mfgrs are realizing that their product needs to be purchased by legitimate resellers before customers can buy it. There are many more legitimate seller's sales to be lost, than worrying about one jilted product user, who bought a gray market part and is now boo-hooing on a forum that the mean old dudes at the mfgr won't hook him up. And more and more shops and even big resellers like Performance, et. al., are choosing not to buy from mfgrs who do warranty work for out-of-channel buyers.

Have you actually paid to ship a wheel lately? Shipping to you may be cheap due to negotiated rates with certain carriers, but once you need to ship something, you will pay dearly.


Where did this come from? And how is it relevant to the discussion? I've yet to find any organization anywhere that could pull that off. If you have, please leave me contact number. I have a few questions I'd like to ask them.

Helllooooo...... I never said "don't shop online". Never. I may have inferred that bikecost.com is not an authorized legitimate reseller of many (at least 3) of the brands they sell, which is true.

Many mfgrs do not want to sell direct. Bikes and wheels aren't toasters or DVD players that require no set up. Which brings me to this:

Thank you for proving my point for me. If online was the ultimate channel where everything is headed, why does Performance, and others, now feel the need to invest millions in brick and mortar stores? Even bikesdirect maintains retail store fronts.

The issue is gray market vs. authorized and supported sales. Not internet vs B&M.

+1 to Bikewise. he was not the one bashing this place or saying it was dishonest. He replied to someone saying there were huge margins in bikes. he also replied that this store was selling things it was not authorized to sell.

He called me out by name on the warranty thing, so I will reply. I 100% believe you are right with Mavic, I have no experience and you do. I am sure more are doing this. I just believe that as a consumer with any interpersonal skills you are going to get warranty coverage on 99% of stuff you buy from the maker (if you have a legit warranty issue and it is within the timing).
Makers want to stop unauthorized selling of their product. There is two ways to do this: 1) go after those places and stop their supply or go after them via litigation where possible or 2) do not support the people that buy this stuff. The second is a very poor way of doing it IMHO. First off, it is assuming word of mouth will spread the word that if you buy this product from AAAA.com you will not get support. That just does not happen. If I buy a widget from ACME from a non-auth reseller and it is defective and ACME tells me to pound sand because of where I bought it . . . what I am going to do? Tell all my friends that ACME is a great company, just do not buy from a non auth reseller? Yeah right. 90% of folks are going to say ACME sucks crank. Secondly, as mostly covered in point 1, it turns the buyer off to the maker, not just the seller. It is in the best interest of the maker to support me and replace my product AND inform me that I should not have done what I did (education) AND find out where I got it and try to stop that from happening.

Call me what you want, but I do not think legal issues like vendor authorization or retailer contracts or whatever are the consumers responsibility (cars and home possibly excluded). Sure ideally it could be . . . but a consumer is just that a consumer. They want to buy things and they want to do it as painlessly as possible. To me it is up to the maker to deal with the other crap. Oakley, Ping (golf) and apple all do this with great success.

Incorrect. Performance Bike shop was a MAIL-ORDER company at it's beginnings....long BEFORE the internet was available to commoners such as ourselves.

As Bikewise has already pointed out they are also heavily invested in physical retail locations as well. Opening more every day in fact. Brand new one destined to open in Schaumburg any day now. That will save me some gas....

Performance is one of the worst example you could ever use to illustrate you supposed points about OBSs.

Personally I get tired of all of the crappy sites that are just store fronts for QBP, and QBP's crappy web shopping type catalog. So tired of them I'd rather head to the LBS and negotiate base margin %'s over QBP wholesale pricing before ever talking about the part I want. Settle on something that will make it worth their time, then rattle off everything you want.

Win-Win.

[rant]If you can't tell already I have been spending an inordinate amount of time recently having to deal with pricing and distribution agreements in my "real life". It gets old when everyone has to give you a sob story for why they are taking their cut. I'd prefer it if everyone dropped the BS and we all sat in a room and negotiated up front margins for everyone. There'd still be some screwing going on, but at least it wouldn't take months of posturing to come to a conclusion. [/rant]

I agree with a lot of what is here. Shimano has tried to do brand policing by establishing their Authorized Shimano deal-e-o. I 100% agree that margins are fairly low on everything bicycle related....it has kept me from starting a shop for years. That said the margins are very high on Shimano components. It becomes obivous when looking at ...oh....I don't know....a R700 compact crank. I believe MSRP is in the neighborhood of $269. Even Performance has it on perpetual sale for $249, and it can be found every single day on E-Bay for under $200.

"Gray product" you say? I can call a few actual bike shops and get it for $180 shipped to my door. Those guys have overhead costs, and they aren't starving either. There's no doubt they are taking a smaller margin, and are kosher with Shimano because they don't advertise the price, but I get the price none-the-less because there is obviously enough room to move that far.

Another brand which has done extremely well at preserving it's brand image, distribution, and pricing integrity would be Assos. Even on E-Bay....

The more I think about this . . .

Bikewise1 and other retailers help me with this.

The more I think about this, the more I agree with me. :)
Why is it the consumers responsibility to control where your product goes? That makes no sense?
If this place (just using it as an example) sells Mavic rims . . . at less than Mavic wants them sold AND/OR they are not an authorized MAVIC dealer. (lets assume these are not fakes as well).
How is it on Joe Internet to ferret out if they are authorized to sell or if they will be under warranty? Why is it not on Mavic to prevent these folks from selling their product? I mean, at some level Mavic has to control where their product goes. If there is a distributer that is selling them to this non-auth seller, stop them. If not, do not give the distributer your product.

Now, I am sure the reason might be 'these places cannot do that or they will go out of business, they do not have that leverage'. Okay, then drop the idea of authorized sellers and warrant all our products.

Assos is a great example. You do not see a buttcoversdirect.com selling them at 50% msrp do you?

Does Ebay check anyone out when they want to sell something? It is all about collecting fees even if the consumer gets hozed in the end.

yeah, paypal and ebay never help people out that get hosed. This internet is all FRAUD and SCAM. Run away from it!!!!!!

Ebay doesnt collect your money. Paypal does and everyone knows Paypal sucks. Id be more concerned if this place took Paypal than I would Google Checkout.

When you pay through Google Checkout, Google collects your money and pays the business. Theyre the middleman.

Everybody knows that paypal sucks. At least you are not making a blanket statement with no facts. That would just hurt your argument.

Many people have a) never had an issue with paypal and b) if they had an issue with a purchase, paypal resolution made everything right. I suspect most people who have all these issues with paypal or ebay or this shop or that shop NEVER have used any of them. There is so much misinformation out there from people so scared of the unknown.

Knock yourself out, chief

www.paypalsucks.com

oh now . . . a dislike sight . . . those are always 100% fair and accurate and cover both sides.

What about the 1 million or so daily transactions on paypal where no one is complaining? My 200+ transactions have never had an issue.

I think people find PayPal disputes to be a very big problem, if they do occur. I realize that Google Checkout is new compared to PayPal but has anyone here had to file a dispute with Google Checkout? Knowing Google, it is probably also a nightmore like PayPal's dispute process is but I would like to hear from someone who has had the experience.

Neither have mine but Ive heard enough bad stuff from people I know and trust to be leary of any kind of protection from Paypal. Paypal first and foremost covers Paypal's ass and if they can cover yours in the process, they will.

Case in point.

A guy on one of my forums bought a set of wheels from a another dude and paid via Paypal. A month or so goes by, no wheels so dude files a Paypal dispute. Goes through all the hoops with the dispute, escalates it, etc and Paypal comes back and tells him "Sorry, the other party has no funds in their account, you're SOL"

There's a zillion stories just like this out there. Paypal is a scammers dream because the only thing Paypal is interested in is Paypal.

Even using their debit card (Which I use all the time), you pretty much have 0 protection. When all this crap started with my Mike Garcia wheels, I looked for a recourse through Paypal and since I was about 7 days outside their window of protection they pretty much told me "Oh well!" Granted all companies are going to have time limits you can actually do something but most real credit card/debit card providers give you a year. Paypal gives you what, 45 days?

Your viewpoint is much more reasonable than I thought. I thought you were a never have used paypal, but I know it will take 100% of your money' type and you clearly are not. Your point of view is food for thought for sure.

The only comment I will make is that most institutions are looking to cover their butt first and then maybe yours. Paypal does not have a monopoly on liking to make money.

I agree.. I just think most other financial institutions are a little more consumer friendly than Paypal from protecting you from fraud/scams.

I guess because they arent a bank and dont operate under FDIC regulation, they can pretty much do what they want.

that does make my sphincter tighten a bit as well

Of course they are not covered by the FDIC. They are however subject to FTC regulations and the FTC has investigated numerous complaints about PayPal and PayPal (ab)users. To say they can do "pretty much what they want" is misleading. In fact, if you have a problem with them, contact the FTC. You will be among the approximately 400,000 fraud complaints the FTC gets yearly. Of those, about 25% involve online fraud, with the remaining 75% from telemarketers/print/radio and television. Further, of the internet fraud complaints registered with the FTC, about 40% concerned payment methods like PayPal and BidPay. So the FTC is watching.

You've never had to rely on Paypal for "Buyer protection". 1000+ transactions, by the way.