Best place to buy car audio?

I agree that ebay is often the cheapest, but some people do get burned by shopping there too. a 500$ deck is a great deal on ebay for 300, but if you never receive it and you end up buying it from the local dealer for 500 anyway, that deck just cost you 800 in the long run. I have been very luck on ebay saving thousands over the yrs, but I have also learned that if you take a price to a local dealer that they often will come very close to the same price. You save the shipping as well and also have a full warranty and a local place to take it should something happen to it.

Give local dealers a chance to earn your business before you shop online.

I always find it funny how everyone say "watchout for eBay", you know what, as long as you pay attention to who you're buying from (read their feedback) and use PayPal for payment only (since if you get screwed you can actually file a complaint with PayPal and if they find in your favor they'll take the money out of the sellers account and put it into yours) you'll be just fine.

And I do try to use local dealers, but half the time they're charging insane prices and I really don't feel like hagling. And as for "if something goes wrong" that's something that happens, but more often than not with present manufacturing processes there really are fewer and fewer manufacturing defects, more often than not it was a screw up by the person installing it.

Oh, and no I don't seel on eBay, I just hare people trying to make the internet sound like the boogey man since they hate competition, this is capitalism, compete or close up shop.

Quite frankly, I like the competition as a consumer, keeps prices down and keeps retail honest

boy, now if you could only take a "go to" attitude like that to mastering proper spelling ....  lol

i find customers like you funny because invariably you are the same guys who buy a product online at a whored down price and then come running to us when it doesnt work or you are having problems or want it tweaked.....

" Well, I bought this Rockford amp online for 100$ cheaper than you sell it for, but now its acting funny so seeing youre a Rockford dealer, you have to fix it /return it for me"

Like I said earlier, I do buy SOME things online if my local guys dont come close, but I am under full knowledge that if somethng is wrong with it that it is not their responsibility just because they are authorized dealers.

Now on the other hand, because I do buy a lot from local dealers as well, if i ever had a problem with something I did buy online, I would hope that they would be a little forgiving and try to help me out knowing that I do buy some stuff from them when they can get close. I understand they need ot stay in business I just hope they understand that i am not a millionaire either and have budgets to work in. I get very frustrated by the dealers that insist that you buy everything there regardless of the system costing 1000$ more for the same stuff, but they are the same people who take their families to shop at Walmart and do nothing to support other local businesses. Its all about getting things for the least possible price. We all have bikks to oand anyway ot save money is what needs ot happen. Wether it is Walmart instead of local shops, or online stereo shops vs private shops.  

Honestly, your not thinking like a shop owner. If you had a customer that bought a system from another place and installed it themselves or got the other place to install it and came to you when there was a problem ( because the other place was not longer in business or just couldn'r fix the problem ) and expected you to take the time to send it in for warranty while trying to explain to the company and the rep that you deal with that this was a "favor" for a customer that didn't buy from you......... Your telling me that you wouldn't take offence to this ?

I wouldn't even consider helping the person because this would teach them a lessen about loyalty and what to expect from shopping a non-authorized dealers & shops that are not capable of servicing their own equipment. I'm in the business to make a living.... not by gouging the customer but by selling the equipment and the service for a reasonable price.

Selling equipment at cost in a shop and raping my customer's for shipping costs is not my cup of tea. If someone came to my shop and said that he/she could get  an amp for $ 100 and I sell it for $ 150.00 and they want it for the same price I'd tell them to go elsewhere  cause I know that there's more to the costs of the equipment than $ 100. There's also shipping, duties, taxes and time spent to go and get the item. Not to mention that I would have the amp installed properly with a discount on the wiring and the installation AND I would wararnty the item for the full term of the manfacturer wararnty period.

Now with that being said, I never sell any of my inventory at full MSRP because in my area I really can't do that because of the customer base we draw from is about 20,000 people and there's a city within 1 hour of us with 800,000 people & alot more stores like mine. So to be competitive I sell for a regular price of 25 % less than MSRP. If this is capatalism then I'm guity as charged, but don't you dare come into my shop and tell me that my prices are too high when I know that the box stores use manfacturer's as lost leaders and the internet doesn't care about customer service after the sale is complete.

If that post was toward me, i think you took what i said out of context or just didnt read it properly. My point was that sometimes a local dealer is close enough in price to make it worth buying from them. However that is not always the case. If an amp for example is 50$ more at a dealer, I will but it there. First of all, there is no shipping, secondly, you have a real warranty and a real person to talk to if something goes wrong, besides you are supporting your local economy which helps everyone. The amp I just bought last week I paid 279 for including shipping. A local shop wanted about 500 for same amp. As much as I like supporting the locals, Im not stupid either. That 200$ paid for all my wiring and fuse holders/dist. blocks that I DID buy from my local guy.

my only point is if i can buy my produce at Walmart for 20$ a week, and that same exact stuff is at a local stand for 40, Im going to Walmart, and all you shop owners shop there too to save money. Take your own advices and stop shopping at Walmart and Home Depot all together and only buy from local businesses. You will see how quickly your money gets thrown away.

racefan, the post was towrads the thread in general ( no pot shots taken at anyone ). I took from each post and IMO the internet is still causing quality equipment to become cheap. That is why there are so many of the manufacturer's out there that are targeting the online stores & auctions and shutting them down. There's nothing wrong with getting a good deal and in some cases it will be online, but in the end the decision that you choose you will have to live with and when/or if you require support in the form of either warranty or technical support your going to be alone cause you don't have that slip of paper that says it's from an authorized dealer.

In your case the $ 500 was probably a MSRP am I correct ? The $ 279 is probably about 5-10 % above cost if not lower so the person who sold it to you made money off the shipping as well.

Velocity, I agree with you 100%. And like i said, i do try to buy local whenever I can. I appreciate al lthe hard work you guys have put into your businesses and will support you as much as my budget allows. I used to manage a car audio shop out of Watertown NY called Audio Junction. Thankfully that was before the big internet craze. We still had the competition from Best Buy/ Circuit City and places like that. Fortunately they didnt carry Hifonics and Orion like we did. They just had cheaper stuff. But still a customer comes in comparing a 200$ 300w amp from Best buy and expect you to match it price wise against your 300w Orion because they are both 300w. Sorry, aint gonna happen. Service and warranty are a big deal and in my opinion worth a little more than a just saving a few bucks on the internet.

In my last amp purchase (the new hifonics bx1606i) I paid 279, and local wanted around 500. So that made it worth it enough to try it online. But I have to take the chance that it works once i hook it up, and it lasts long enough to exceed the warranty, cuz if anything happens, its my problem.

i think the juxt of this whole thread is that there will always be people who shop online and always be people who prefer to support local business.....  Jeff briefly touched on some of what you dont realize when you shop locally.... i tried to explain this just this week to my wife who also thinks Cheat-me-bay is so great.... when i buy a sub for $100 and sell it for $150.. i dont make $50 profit... i make $50 minus the cost of my rent, heat, power, sewage, telephone, business cards, business taxes, etc, etc.....

i think what any shop owner like Jeff, Rob or myself will try to explain is that there is an inherent cost to doing business and even having our doors open to be able to provide you with the services we do..... if i had no other cost in the world than the cost of the product i buy, then i could probably match an online retailers price everyday..... so to the guys that say "get competetive or go out of business" i would say.. who are you going to take your system to when you have all the gear installed and something isnt working... are you going to drive your vehicle to Sound Domain?  to Crutchfield??      in all likelihood you'll drive it to a local install shop and ask for their help......

just try to remember when we open our doors at 8:00 am.. we are starting at a negative and have to at least be able to earn enough to cover the cost of having that door open to be able to service you..... which we do gladly (cause weirdly after 25 years i still really love car audio/media)   so next time you price shop something between an online retailer and a local retailer i hope y'all try to consider some of this......

kgerry wrote:

---

i think the juxt of this whole thread is that there will always be people who shop online and always be people who prefer to support local business.....  Jeff briefly touched on some of what you dont realize when you shop locally.... i tried to explain this just this week to my wife who also thinks Cheat-me-bay is so great.... when i buy a sub for $100 and sell it for $150.. i dont make $50 profit... i make $50 minus the cost of my rent, heat, power, sewage, telephone, business cards, business taxes, etc, etc.....

i think what any shop owner like Jeff, Rob or myself will try to explain is that there is an inherent cost to doing business and even having our doors open to be able to provide you with the services we do..... if i had no other cost in the world than the cost of the product i buy, then i could probably match an online retailers price everyday..... so to the guys that say "get competetive or go out of business" i would say.. who are you going to take your system to when you have all the gear installed and something isnt working... are you going to drive your vehicle to Sound Domain?  to Crutchfield??      in all likelihood you'll drive it to a local install shop and ask for their help......

just try to remember when we open our doors at 8:00 am.. we are starting at a negative and have to at least be able to earn enough to cover the cost of having that door open to be able to service you..... which we do gladly (cause weirdly after 25 years i still really love car audio/media)   so next time you price shop something between an online retailer and a local retailer i hope y'all try to consider some of this......

---

Thank you Kevin, couldn't have said it better myself.

racefan15 wrote:

---

Now on the other hand, because I do buy a lot from local dealers as well, if i ever had a problem with something I did buy online, I would hope that they would be a little forgiving and try to help me out knowing that I do buy some stuff from them when they can get close.  

---

Let me explain why this isnt gonna be the case alot of the time. I work for a big box store so Im not helping the little guy out either, but I bet the indy shops can Identify with this little story. I had a customer come in with some flee bay knock off POS amp that wasnt working, he installed it himself and the amp came on but the sub made no sound at all. I followed normal trouble shooting procedures for this customer, who buy the way had bought several thousand dollars in gear off me for his good car and this was in his beater. I pulled the sub outta the box and bumped it, it worked fine, put it back in the box, which I had disconected from the amp, and bumped the box, it worked fine as well. I tested the ground, it was garbage so redid the ground and it know tested fine but the amp still did not work. The lights were on but no one was home. I checked the power and it was providing 13. something or other volts when running so it was fine, remote was the same. I tried the output on the deck and it was delivering signal as well so it was clearly the amp. Out of intrest I hit my hand on the top of the amp and it started to work for about 15 seconds then stopped. I repeated this process a couple times with the same results everytime. I showed the customer and he looked at me and asked what I did to his amp. I said that it was clearly defective and explained how his ground was trash but I fixed that and that if he hooked up another amp it would work fine. I did not charge to do any of this either. Long story short he was saying that the amp was fine and should have worked after I fixed HIS IMPROPER ground and that I must have damaged his amp and he wanted me to replace it for him. I politly told him to hit the bricks. Long story short is do you think I am ever gonna help out some cheap skate again, esspecially for free, regardless of what he has boughten off me in the past. Its not worth it as it just opens up doors to problems. Try looking at it from both sides next time and you'll see that as much as you want to save your money, I still need to make money and I dont do that by fixing problems of people who buy wire and distrobution blocks off me.

Sorry about my spelling befor hand.The only spell checker is in rich text.

Anyway I do like to buy from a local shop but scince I have stationed to AZ I just have not found a shop that will help you out on prices and they always seem to want to sell you something you don't need. Then again where I used to get all my stuff from befor I always hung out there on my lunch break in Highschool. I still swing by and say high when I am in town that is just the type of shop it was.  Now the people on this sight if you had a shop in my part of town I would get from you because it is some one you feel like you know. Getting stuff on flea bay  you do take a chance on line but then again if you have a tight budget sometimes it's a better route but by the same token you should not expect the product manufacture to stand behind the product either nor any local shop and unless you know what your doing pay some money out and have the product tested by a shop and install it but don't hold them responable if the amp dose not work.

xtremej, it sounds like you have a nice shop and those are the few extra things that would make me want to buy form your shop that and customer service is a big part of it, with out the high pressure sales that you get from some of the big box stores that don't know anything about the product that they sell and just make it up as they go along, had that happen befor.  Ok I am done rambling

Raven, so you are saying that just becuase you had one "bad" customer out of the thousand or so you have done work for that you will not help anyone out ever again? You probably made 500$ or so off this 2000$ purchase in his good car. Just because he was an idiot about saying you ruined his amp, think about it if it was just a ground problem. It would have taken you 5 minuites to fix, you could have charged him 25$ for 5 min work, and think of the repeat business that could have generated for you. He already spent 2g on his other car with you. So helping him out with a quick 5 minuite ground wire problem on his beater car (which you could have made a quick 25$ on) he might have told 10 friends to buy from you because you were willing to help him out in a time a need.

Now with your new policy, the first person who buys a big system from you, then goes back with a quick problem in his wifes car (for example) that he didnt purchase from you, you are going to tell him "sorry, you didnt buy it here, get out of my shop"  He will never buy another system from you in all of his 5-10 new cars. This could potentioally cost you over 10,000 over the years. not to mention him telling 20 people not to buy from you because you werent willing to help him out with a 5 min problem. That could lead to 100,000$ loss.

Its your business, run it the way you want.

I can understand where Raven is coming from, I have helped out a lot of people who buy things elsewhere. I am the "new shop" with more expereince than the others locally,  I'll share this much almost every person I have helped has come in to my store to buy merchandise or have me install equipment for them afterwards. This is not always the case though and it can pizz a guy off pretty quick when some putz blames you for damaging his dime store junk he bought on flee-bay.  I just had this happen with a boss amp last week , amp was doa on arrival client blamed me? I was not smiling. But not all clients are evil and I got over it.  Being helpful can pay off but it can get you burned also. But I beleive the pro's out weigh the cons. My .02 cents.

racefan15 wrote:

---

Raven, so you are saying that just becuase you had one "bad" customer out of the thousand or so you have done work for that you will not help anyone out ever again? You probably made 500$ or so off this 2000$ purchase in his good car. Just because he was an idiot about saying you ruined his amp, think about it if it was just a ground problem. It would have taken you 5 minuites to fix, you could have charged him 25$ for 5 min work, and think of the repeat business that could have generated for you. He already spent 2g on his other car with you. So helping him out with a quick 5 minuite ground wire problem on his beater car (which you could have made a quick 25$ on) he might have told 10 friends to buy from you because you were willing to help him out in a time a need.

---

Your mising the point here racefan15......... your not thinking like a business owner again. Ravendarat stated one case and IMO if that same customer came back to me with another problem I would kindly say "no, we would charge you for the time spent on it." If someone from a shop or box store charged you $ 25 for 5 minutes ( that's $ 300 per hour ) of work to potentially fix a ground problem I don't think you'll be telling all your friends about how "good this shop was." I would be telling people that this place was extremely expensive, but knew what they were doing, but still didn't fix the problem & charged me for it !

Now it's human nature to focus and remember the bad experiences and also to wallow in them as well. Taking from one bad experience and learning from it is good business sense ! If you allow the same thing to happen with another customer in another scenario, but this time the customer raises a BIG stink about how you " damaged " his eBay amplifier that was working fine before..... well you just aquired a damaged amp or will have to pay for fixing it. Not good business sense and a good saying that I've heard in the past is " ...........fool me once and shame on you.... fool me twice then shame on me "

or to quote Great White    " Once Bitten, Twice Shy "

Ok, Ian Hunter actually, but no one but me is going to remember Mott the Hoople here.....

racefan15 wrote:

---

Raven, so you are saying that just becuase you had one "bad" customer out of the thousand or so you have done work for that you will not help anyone out ever again? You probably made 500$ or so off this 2000$ purchase in his good car. Just because he was an idiot about saying you ruined his amp, think about it if it was just a ground problem. It would have taken you 5 minuites to fix, you could have charged him 25$ for 5 min work, and think of the repeat business that could have generated for you. He already spent 2g on his other car with you. So helping him out with a quick 5 minuite ground wire problem on his beater car (which you could have made a quick 25$ on) he might have told 10 friends to buy from you because you were willing to help him out in a time a need.

Now with your new policy, the first person who buys a big system from you, then goes back with a quick problem in his wifes car (for example) that he didnt purchase from you, you are going to tell him "sorry, you didnt buy it here, get out of my shop"  He will never buy another system from you in all of his 5-10 new cars. This could potentioally cost you over 10,000 over the years. not to mention him telling 20 people not to buy from you because you werent willing to help him out with a 5 min problem. That could lead to 100,000$ loss.

Its your business, run it the way you want.

---

Did you actually read what I did? If you are someone who does this for a living ( I really dont know because I dont know anything about you) then you would relise that this wasnt 5 minutes of trouble shooting. My total time including talking to the customer before and after service and what not had me in for about 45 minutes. I run my side of the buisness and this is time I could have easily spent installing a deck for another customer WHO DID buy it from me, but instead I was nice to this guy and he tried to burn me on it. So you ask if I will ever do it again? Well if the guy comes in with some low end piece of junk that most likely defective off the get go, then ya I will refuse because I wont put myself in a vunerable situation for the sake of making an alphimisonic amp work that was boughten somewhere else and installed by a driveway mechanic. If that same person comes to me with a Brand Name amp bought from a local retailer, regardless of whether it was me or not, and installed it themselves and asks me to look at it, then ya I probally will becuase the chance of the amp being defective out of the box decreases huge and if the amp IS defetive then its simple to say, "you need to take this back and exchange it because it doesnt work" Simple and done. Someone who buys it off fleebay and is well aware that they either have no return/exchange privaliage or the policy is their but a pain to work with, is far more likely to try to screw me over. They can go and try it on someone else cause momma didnt raise no fool.

kgerry wrote:

---

boy, now if you could only take a "go to" attitude like that to mastering proper spelling ....  lol

i find customers like you funny because invariably you are the same guys who buy a product online at a whored down price and then come running to us when it doesnt work or you are having problems or want it tweaked.....

---

mike swanson wrote:

---

...........fool me once and shame on you.... fool me twice then shame on me "

Hey Jeff
Didnt Bush try to say that once? LOL

---

Nope, no, I'm almost certain it was Clinton who said that

Ebay may have low prices, but the sellers just jack up the shipping costs. So your just paying the same price as most other places. On top of that you don't get the factory warrenty.

Paradigm wrote:

---

mike swanson wrote:

---

...........fool me once and shame on you.... fool me twice then shame on me "

Hey Jeff
Didnt Bush try to say that once? LOL

---

Nope, no, I'm almost certain it was Clinton who said that

---

No man, Bush tried to say it and said something along the lines of  "Fool me once shame on........... shame on......... You fool me once you cant fool us again" It was quite poetic of the President of The United States.

Regardless of the product you buy off eBay, it cheapens the brand name and causes problems for authorized dealers because of the lack of after sales service that the online stores offer. One big + for the local shops is that if there is a legitimate problem with a product that we sell you we send it in for warranty and this is at the cost of the shop, not to you. On some of the product lines that we have, we just give you another unit off the shelf so your not down any time aside from bringing us the damaged product. You will NOT  get this kind of service from an online dealer.

First you have to pay for your own shipping costs and thenyou have to play the waiting game. IF for some reason the courier lost your parcel and you didn't place added insurance on the package, you just lost out on everything. If your lucky enough for the package to arrive to the dealer, it would probably take them a couple of weeks + for them to look at the product and issue you a replacement or if they decide to fix the product, add weeks to this time frame.

Frustrations compound if the courier loses the returned product on it's way back to you in the mail. All in all, bottom line is that when there's a problem with a locally bought product, we're here to back you up ( as long as it's a legitimate claim ).