I swear online shopping used to be more reliable. Even game publisher websites are absolute shit. I ordered a couple games on sale from the Square-Enix site. Standard shipping is $9, which is ridiculous to begin with, and Priority was $11. I sprung for Priority, and the assholes sat on my order for 5 days before mailing it. It was old titles sitting in their goddamn warehouse. I've found other similar complaints and worse upon farther research.

I also ordered 3 bolo ties from a place called Old West Gallery. Those clowns sat on my order for 3 weeks. I emailed their site twice and never got a response. I finally contacted them through Paypal to start a dispute and they shipped the order. There's a bunch of similar complaints about that place too if you Google it.

Good service is getting harder and harder to find...and most of it doesn't speak English.

There's a sucker born every minute as they say, same with buyer beware.

If you don't buy from mainstream well known sites, you're taking a big gamble and ya get what ya get I guess.

Lesson being, do your homework before plunking down your credit card/hard earned money.

To answer the question posed in the thread title, yes you should definitely research and look for reviews on e-commerce sites before you order from them. It's just common sense.

It's not common sense to do extra research on a AAA fucking game publisher's official site.

I'd bet sites like that just farm out their fulfillment to some crappy 3rd party.

Then why ask the question? Rhetorical or not.

Before I think of making a purchase on a unfamiliar site I do a google search on reviews. I also check the site's "About Us" to see if there are any typos or weird wordings which are signs of a scammer.

It's becoming worse............ I like to purchase from smaller less known sites/vendors to avoid sending money to Amazon, WalMart and the like. Anecdotally I'm about 50/50 on orders with and without issues. When I see any seller mention there might be a delay in processing I now run.

Sure it is. A simple google search usually suffices. Of course, then you would find something else to complain about.

That's what I do as well. Some people are too lazy to do a simple google search, I guess. Or perhaps they simply like throwing their money away.

Why? Why Amazon they do a great job. They have a great return policy and when they fuck up they let you keep the item for free. A smaller company/store is not going to allow that.

That has to be it.

I believe that once all the smaller stores are gone then the "real" Amazon will emerge and you can forget all the perks and refunds with keeping merch and the like. Of course there will still be Walmart to keep em honest.

In terms of online, they basically already are gone. Amazon is surpassing Apple and Google for a reason.

And if they ever did have a "read Amazon" emerge, someone else will just come in and do what Besos did originally to succeed.

To be honest nobody should be keeping free things they didn't pay for. Amazon shouldn't be spoiling people but by doing so they are winning the hearts of customers. Nothing in this life stays the same. Big name stores go down, others rise up. It's the nature of commerce.

Exactly.