Don't EVER buy from Adorama!!!!!!! Especially via EBAY

I don't know where else to post this and I know complaints about Adorama are on

here BUT...

 

I made the mistake of buying from Adorama. I'm out about $100 in postage and

camera tech costs and I'm out a couple of months of having my camera.

 

They don't respond to emails.

 

They misrepresent the stuff they sell.

 

They lied to me in emails and didn't live up to their word once.

 

They cost me money.

 

They give revenge negative feedback on ebay! I checked on their feedback and

noticed that there were quite a few with similar complaints to me and the ALL

had been given revenge feedback. All of them!!!!

 

That would explain why their feedback rating is much higher than they deserve!

 

IN SHORT THEY ARE ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC AND SHOULDN"T BE REWARDED WITH YOUR HARD

EARNED CASH - SO DON"T BUY FROM THEM.

 

I saw that at least one of their guys looks at this forum. I can't wait for

him to defend the pathetic store again. Nothing personal to him particularly

[unless he owns the place!]

Give specifics to back up your complaint. What's your ebay ID? What was the item?

 

Not defending them, but I've not had trouble at all with them. All you've posted is a bunch of unsubstantiated rants.

What Richard said.

 

The way you are going about what you are doing now does not give me a lot of confidence that you went about dealing with your transaction the right way. Have you approached Safe Harbour at eBay? Have you contacted your credit card company? Lets have some factual details.

This thread should be deleted, together with the OP

I agree with Ronaldo, but I'd like to see the OP's response first.

Im certainly not impressed with them either. I bought a reasonably expensive light meter from them before (sent internationally) that didnt work. Then Im supposed to pay return postage for their inability to check what they send out.

When one places a negative feedback, can ALWAYS expect to get negative feedback even if is a saint, and that is the rule on eBay. What else would you expect, this is the rule of eBay.

 

eBay will not take your side, they must protect their paying parties, and that is the seller. You will never go anywhere with complaints.

 

If you placed negative feedback about Adorama, you could have caused significant business loss to them, and they will not take this lightly, and neither will eBay, even if you are right they will retaliate one way or another.

 

On the Adorama subject, I made many purchases, and all were professional and on time with no problem, but I use Adorama web site. Going through eBay to purchase from Adorama ? Why ? eBay provides some sort of "animosity" shelter, even if you eventually know who the seller is, complaints against Adorama will be "bufferred" by eBay.

I won't buy anything there either. If you visit their store, you'd understand why. They aren't very customer friendly once they get your money adn the store is a dump. I've had bad experiances with em as well.

 

Paul NYC

I have mixed feelings about Adorama. I used to buy a lot of stuff through their website and really never had problems, except they typically don;t tell you on their site of the item is in stock or not (B&H does this much better). Like you though, I bough a color analyzer for my darkroom (Jobo top model) on eBay from them and when the unit arrived it did not work. In their eBay posting they were toting the Adorama guarantee and bla, bla, bla. I called them up and they told me that this item has been sitting on the shelf for years and that they would neither refund my money or honor their Adorama guarantee - they just did NOT care at all. I ended up dealing with the distributor and it took 6 months to get the damn thing fixed - Adorama never paid a dime or answered any emails. I will not buy from them again - B&H is where I shop now - never had a problem!

Reseller Ratings (www.resellerratings.com) gives Adorama a lifetime score of 6.55. Their reviews seem to be a mix of the very happy and the very unhappy. Compare this to B&H's lifetime rating of 9.33. Guess where I shop?

My experience with Adorama has been generally good. One item was not really as described but the price was low enough and the item works well enough that I didn't make an issue of it. What has been happening for some time is that people who work at camera stores know less and less about camera equipment. They do a decent job when they sell a new item at a good price and ship it out promptly. When you get to older equipment it's a different story.

 

I have purchased lenses in Canon FD mount with non-working aperture mechanisms. How does this happen? No one put these lenses onto a body to check them. An auction page which describes a lens has having "good glass" doesn't mean the lens is working properly mechanically. An item like a color analyzer which is part of a system is almost never tested. How could it be? The seller isn't going to maintain all of the components of many systems just to have the ability to test one part when they find it. You have to know which dealers actually know something about used camera equipment. I have found that B&H, KEH, Cameta Camera, Midwest Photo and Brooklyn Camera know what they're doing. I'm sure there are many others but when you are looking on eBay where many sellers are individuals, pawn shops and independent or franchise "sell anything" places you can't expect them to all be experts in camera equipment. Some of my best buys have come from these places but I won't pay nearly as much for an item from one of them as I would from a known store and I am realistic enough to know that the condition of the item may no be perfect.

Adorama bullshitted me to. Never got back to me. Took my money. Luckily I bought it through Amazon and got my money back.

 

They didn't get my business again...

 

-Mario

I've had issues and do not shop at Adorama any more.

I purchased three used items from Adorama. Two camera bodies and a lens. I purchased from there web site. Everything I purchased was somehow broken or not working. On two of the items I did return the item and got a refund. On the third item I did not notice the malfunction and it was too late to get my money back. From my experience I would never buy a used item from Adorama.

P.T.Barnum: said it best when it comes to the Internet dealings?

[ There Is A sucker born Every Minute:]

But as For adorama I have had nothing but great service and great E-mail service from them and have bought at least three or four items from them and have had no problems: Sometimes We are selfs can be the problem in dealing with others, We precieve something one way and it turns out to be another way and we get mad and its everybody else's fault:

 

So Kindly give us the exact facts and not your Anger:

I bought a lens from them on fleabay and had a lot of problems with it. They never responded to my emails. It was about $100, and with a CLA to fix it, about worth its market value, so I figured I'd eat it as a lesson not to buy from Adorama rather than risk damage to my rating.

 

Too bad for them because I buy thousands of dollars of equipment and materials from BHPhoto and a somewhat local dealer.

If you had looked through the archives here at photo.net, you'd notice that the conventional wisdom is: Never buy USED from Adorama, unless you can personally inspect it first, i.e., be at their store. If buying used, first shop at keh.com.

 

If buying new, first option should always be B&H, unless you want to support a local store in your area.

 

The only time I buy anything from Adorama these days is when I need to restock darkroom chemicals that I can't get locally and that B&H won't ship.

Never had anything but problems when ordering from Adorama; most of these had to do with very slow processing of orders. I once ordered some film from B&H and Adorama at the same time (neither had all the films I needed). B&H delivered within 2 days. A week I called Adorama and learned that they didn't even ship the order! Note that this was not an isolated problem which is why I only buy from B&H. I once ordered a $10 cable release from B&H. Within a few days of use it broke. I offered to return it to them but they suggested I just dispose of it. They sent me a free replacement within a few days.

bad experience with adorama also. will never deal with them again.

My first experience with Adorama was three years ago. I decided at the last minute to take a road trip, and wanted to buy a couple of lenses to take with me.

 

B&H was out of stock on one of the lenses, so I ordered them by phone from Adorama (I was driving at the time). I placed the order well before their daily deadline for shipping, and authorized overnight shipping for delivery by 10:30 the next morning.

 

By noon the next day (when I planned to leave), still no delivery. I called Adorama, and they confirmed my order, that items were in stock, and the 10:30 am delivery, but told me the order hadn't shipped yet. No reason, no explanation, no apology.

 

I cancelled the order immediately, and spent the next three hours calling around and then driving to two area shops to buy the lenses (neither shop had both in stock), paid a 20% premium, and started my trip 5 hours behind schedule.

 

Since that experience, I would only buy from Adorama if I couldn't get the item I needed anywhere elsewhere. That has yet to be the case.

Why don't you bring this up with e-bay? I believe they have some sort of policy that protects the buyers when it comes to what was actually advertised and what you got. Also if you paid Pay-Pal, you have an even better chance of getting your money back with their dispute resolution policy which will tie up Adoramas Pay-Pal account till it's settled.

I live in Brooklyn.<p>I bought one item from Adorama <i>but in the store</i> because B&H did not have the item and they did.<br> Everything else I buy and bought at B&H. 'nough said.

I won't be providing details of the transaction, primarily because I know Adorama staff post on this forum and I like my feedback rating at 100%. I think there are more than enough posts here to back up my original complaint in any case. If you still have doubts, you're just going to have to take me at my word. Alternatively, search the forums here and on other sites like photography review, etc. You'll find quite a few others like this one, I assure you.

 

I didn't use paypal and I have no satisfactory avenues to pursue through ebay (and like I said I place some value on my feedback rating).

 

It's interesting that there were so many vehemently aggressive responses so early and then a pile of people backing up the original argument. To those who think this is an inappropriate post, I say that this is grass roots consumer activism and an attempt to save people from wasting their hard earned cash on a company that by my research (which sadly I did much too little of BEFORE buying from Adorama) seems like it is a regular occurrence. There is no [long-term] place for bad business on the internet, precisely because of this kind of activism [yes I recognise there will always be scams but I think an intelligent person could see my point].

 

I agree with the comments on feedback ratings posted above. Intuitively I believe that if Adorama has 1.5% negative feedback, then there could potentially be 3 times that number of people that have not given feedback to prevent their own scores being lowered by retaliatory feedback. I guess by that assumption that this would mean that the odds of getting a dodgy product from Adorama are 1 in 17. Anyone want to take those odds on purchases of hundreds or thousands of dollars??? Now I think of it, I sure as hell wouldn't.

 

Finally, if the moderators feel this thread should be removed then perhaps many of the other threads on this forum regarding complaints about Adorama should be removed. There are quite a few already and I don't mind adding to them one bit.

I made a similar post about Adorama some time ago. I will never buy from them again as my one and only deal with them was an utter disaster. My experience with them echoes the negative comments made about them on all counts.

 

In my case, I was making an initial purchase of a simple item for a corporate machine vision project. Their performance on what should have been a simple sale, and their total disregard for me as a customer over the ensuing time I tried to deal with them, cost them a tremendous amount of money in the long run.

 

It would have been so easy for them to help me had they been the least bit competent. If a company is too inept to service a measly thousand dollar sale then by no means would I trust them with business worth an order of magnitude more.

Hugh, you said: "It's interesting that there were so many vehemently aggressive responses so early and then a pile of people backing up the original argument."

 

You posted a long, forceful message with lots of general rants and complaints and no specific details. Some other posters asked for details, and suggested you might want to tone-down your phrasing. Who's being vehemently aggressive?