Which online seller do you trust the least?

[Markintosh]

Speedy wrote:
ValueAmerica was great.

I knew this would come up. I loved ValueAmerica ....it was WalMart pricing online before WalMart was WalMart.

[AAA]

I don't even recall value america

[GGD]

If we're digging into the past, how about CyberRebate.com

http://news.cnet.com/2010-1071-281467.html

[the_poochies]

eBay.

I've ordered major appliances from Buy.com without any problems.

[Bill in NC]

batteries.com (allowed my credit card # to be stolen)

bhphoto.com (charging credit card for items not in stock)

[davester]

Webvan hasn't been returning my calls.

[Paul F.]

B&H Photo.

They double shipped part of an order to us (a school).
We returned the double-shipped merchandise, and they insisted that we pay for the "other half" of the double-shipment.... the items that were never recieved.

After 18 months of our business manager hanging up on them, I think they finally took the hint that we weren't paying for their trained monkeys in the shipping department to pocket the stuff they said they "double shipped" and didn't.

[AAA]

I do not hear much bad news about B and H. Interesting.

[Mike Johnson]

There was the time there was a price mistake on a nice monitor, and buy.com went ahead and charged everybody's credit cards, and took about six weeks to refund the charges. So long, in fact, that I had to pay the bill to the credit card company while waiting to see if mine would actually ship.

I didn't want to dispute the charge because they still weren't saying whether they'd honor the price. Some people lucky enough to have a soapbox -- like a well-known website, or a published magazine column -- got their monitors, even though they'd clearly ordered after most of us unlucky shlubs. Meanwhile, buy.com claimed they were out of stock, but if you wanted to pay the regular price, they had plenty in the warehouse. Go figure.

They had no price mistake disclaimer, by the way. None at all. Then they went and retroactively amended their disclaimer to include price mistakes, and tried to claim that it had been there all along. However, many people (myself included) had screen caps of all the fine print.

I forget the details, but it was something like a $500 monitor for $200. A great deal, but not like 90% off. At the time, they were famous for these crazy, loss leader deals, and so it was certainly plausible. They were encouraging the frenzies.

When all the dust settled, they started a new marketing feature: Price Mistake of the Day. Charming, eh?

I won't ever buy anything from them. I write polite letters to sites like dealmac and consumerist, asking them to reconsider listing buy.com "deals."

In a pleasant twist, I was working at a high school when this all happened. A couple months later, I heard about an approved purchase order for something like $75,000 from buy.com. I got it canceled.