First off, I'm not saying that all vendors here are bad. I have gotten
one good deal. I'm saying that as a group, they've been something of a disappointment price-wise. I'm accustomed to dealing with Jeep vendors, who give some pretty amazing discounts to members of the Jeep forums. The forum "discounts" here that are higher than other vendors' regular prices fall way short of what I'm used to.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shutter
(Post 1851484)
MANY MANY "sellers" on Amazon are not authorized dealers or distributors, so when you run into an issue with a product, and the "seller" doesn't help you, the manufacture wont either-since you purchased from an un-authorized dealer.
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To be clear, the part I mentioned above was sold by AMAZON itself, not by one of the myriad weirdos selling on Amazon Marketplace.
Furthermore, it's silly to assume that just because the seller isn't a vendor here that they don't support their products. I've been buying car parts from reputable sources for a lot longer than this board has been in existence. Reputable vendors didn't suddenly spring into existence just because someone registered the ft86club.com domain name.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shutter
(Post 1851484)
Constant undercutting and stealing/ripping off of companies who make, design and invest money to creat new parts is KILLING the car industry and potential innovation for new products. Is the car mod business gonna die? No, but it certainly is affected by this.
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Maybe its just too "American" of me to support the companies that you hear about who invest so much time and resources into allowing me to customize my car-by creating products that make the 86 platform strong, unique and community oriented.
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I'm not talking about vendors here who are designing their own products, and I'm not talking about buying cheap knock-offs. I'm talking about resellers buying Japanese products they didn't design or manufacture and selling them as vendors on the board. Again and again I am finding
other vendors distributing the exact same products at a lower price, sometimes significantly lower than the "special" prices the forum vendors list in their posts. I see forum vendors exclaiming that they have the lowest price anywhere on a particular product, only to find three or four other sources that are 10% cheaper when I go looking. (I figure they must get plenty of business from suckers who don't bother doing their research.)
And I'm not really interested in price matching. If I have already found it cheaper or with better shipping terms somewhere else, I see no reason to waste my time begging a forum vendor to get me to the same price I've already found. If you wanted my business, you should have competed for it from the beginning.
When I was a teenager I worked for a musical instrument shop owned by a minister of music at a local megachurch. The shop did mediocre repair work but charged the highest rates in town. He had no shortage of business, however, because all the churches and religious schools used him, and religious types would bring their instruments in for service just because he had the fish on his sign. He also had a brisk business buying up used instruments and selling them to the churchgoers for more than they could buy them new if they knew where to look. He could charge them practically anything, because they were religiously loyal to the point they didn't realize he was fleecing them.
I kind of get the sense that a lot of that is going on here, with people demonstrating their loyalty to the Church of 86 by buying from ordained vendors. Maybe there's a special hell for apostates such as myself who don't buy into the hype, but I think I'll spend my money on the best deal instead.