Guide to Digital Photography Part 1

In my research of compiling horror stories of people taken for a ride, a lot of them invariably start off along these lines “Company X had an 84 reseller rating but then it all went wrong and now I can’t stop crying when I connect to the internet…”

Reseller rating websites represent a valuable resource. But beware, they can and are exploited on a regular bases. How is it that a lot of notoriously shady online businesses often have rather good ratings? In some cases, the ratings for the scam artists may be higher than well known and respectable retailers. The main reason is that every entry in the respectable retailer’s feedback section is, most likely, input by genuine customers where some of the gleeming feedback for bad resellers are entered... by somebody else.

If you carefully look at the actual feedback for some of the retailers that are known to be shady, you will see some extremely low rated feedback entries that are separated by chunks of 4-5 really good ones. Further inspection shows that all those really good ratings are all typically input the same date or in the same two day span of time. How curious. Once more, for some reason (and here, I’m being sarcastic, I know the answer), this inflow of positive chunks of feedback usually start ramping up leading up to the Christmas shopping season of October, November, and Dececember when prospective customers are scrambling to find that great deal for grandson’s new digicam.


I’m going to flat out and say it, there are a lot of bogus entries and their existence serves to hide the truth and deceive people who value and trust the reseller rating system’s information. Do these guys have legitimate, happy customers who log in and share their positive buying experience? Sure they do. But when you see a series of five raving reviews broken interrupted by one or two ranting “do not buy from these guys” reviews, you should be cautious. Any real feedback is going to look like the real world, some great ones, a lot of good ones, and some really bad ones stretched out over regular, real world, intervals.

I’m not saying disregard reseller ratings, use them. Hopefully, what I have found out will make the information more accurate than what you may have percieved before. It is not the reseller rating system’s fault. In order to get honest feedback they need to make the process as easy as possible, otherwise, you will not get people to participate. Extensive validation that might weed out fraudulent positives would also render it more of a hassle than it’s worth for actual consumers wanting to share their shopping experience. Just go into it knowing how they work. Sometimes the fraudulent entries can tell you a lot more about a reseller than the honest to goodness ones. In the end, they hit their target.

I hope that I have been able to open your eyes and avoided hearing future horror stories from our own readers about their technology purchases. Whilst some of this may have been obvious, I consider myself quite a grizzled and experienced tech toy buyer and if I can be surprised and almost lured into a horrible experience, then surely, there are others out there as well. For me, my handicap was my confidence that I knew what I was doing and I consequently came real close to making a mistake. Perhaps, if I was more cautious and less confident, I would’ve done as much research on retailers as I did on the camera technology. But as long as I see story after story of a victimized consumer in this regard, I think this could serve as a guide. I know that, as a consumer, my business loyalty is hard to earn but when a company does pass the test, I like to reward that trust.