I'm in a learning phase when it comes to online shopping, and I don't know if I'll ever get comfortable with the open-ended nature of the online/mailorder experience where the vendors basically seem to hold all the cards. Unfortunately, it seems that none of the local brick&mortar vendors have the hotrod computer components I'm looking for at competitive prices, so I feel like I don't really have a choice - I have to venture out onto the WWW and take my chances. I may in fact have already been shafted in at least a minor way by a vendor who promised prompt delivery but who then consigned my package to UPS for delivery by rowboat via Antarctica - it's currently not expected to arrive for another week instead of the promised 3 days (shoulda been here yesterday!) Now, any reasonable person would agree that if that's the worst abuse I ever suffer I should just count my blessings and be quiet. I'm irked, though, because it turns out that the vendor in question has a reputation for exactly this kind of misbehavior. I could have made a better purchase decision if only I'd known... Knowledge is definitely power in such situations, and I've just learned (too late) about one possible source of such knowledge: http://www.resellerratings.com/ which hosts an impresssively large list of resellers with ratings and commentary supplied (ostensibly) by customers, with some effort made to authenticate the input and prevent either customers or vendors from stuffing the ballot-box. You can see that getting around their authentication wouldn't be much of a trick and, obviously, people are much more likely to provide input to such a database when they've had a bad experience, so you have to view the results with those provisos in mind. But they might be worth a look the next time you're wondering who you're giving your credit card number to... P.S. That outfit I mentioned previously (as having some attractive prices on barebones Tbird systems) gets some generally good ratings and commentary there. ********************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the *body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter: unsubscribe gnhlug **********************************************************
