"This order has missed or could potentially miss the estimated ship date quoted to you. The new estimated ship date for your software and accessories order is 8/10/01."
Needless to say, I was less than pleased. I immediately called Dell and after holding for 20 minutes, I asked what was going on. The guy on the other end of the phone was extremely unhelpful. I asked if he could tell me what caused the delay -- did the shipment not come in or did it come in but wasn't large enough to fulfill all of the back orders? He said that he didn't have access to that information. I asked to speak to someone who DID have access. He told me that no one in the COMPANY could tell me that (yeah, right.) Dan got his camera on Monday, so the reason was that the shipment wasn't large enough. I then asked the Dell boy how much confidence I could have in the August 10 ship date and he told me that he really didn't know if it would actually ship then or not. Now, I don't believe for a minute that Dell's order system isn't smart enough to know how many backorders of an item there are and how many of that item are expected on the next shipment so that they can cross reference the two and give you an accurate ship date. They are probably afraid that if they did that, people would immediately cancel their orders when they found out that they weren't going to be shipped for 2 or 3 weeks (or longer.) The way they do it, you might just as well say, "Well, I've waited this long -- what's another couple of weeks?"
At this point I didn't want to cancel my order until I knew I could get the camera somewhere else quicker, so I hung up and began searching the internet. I had remembered hearing good things about Buydig.com so I looked them up at Resellerratings. Their rating was a 5.0 out of 7.0 which is pretty good. The recent customer comments were almost all favorable so I checked the price on their site -- $853. After adding $39.99 for 2-day Fedex (a ridiculous shipping charge, but at that low price for the camera, the difference between them and Dell was only $2) the total came to $892.99. So I called them, ready for the big push for accessories that I knew I would get. Michael (extension 521) answered the phone and he was a very pleasant person. I told him what I needed, he verified the price, and said that they had them in stock. He then asked "which accessory kit would you like today?" I politely refused, making a joke that my wife was ready to skin me for spending $900 already so I better not push my luck. He didn't push and told me that if I changed my mind, he would give me 30 days to buy accessories with free shipping. This being rather late on a Friday afternoon, he said that the camera would ship 2-day Fedex on Monday and that I would have it on Wednesday. On Monday morning, I got an order confirmation email from them and on Monday afternoon, I got another email saying that my order had been shipped and providing me with a Fedex tracking number. I received the camera on Wednesday and all was well. It is a US market camera with a warranty card and everything. All of the pieces were in the box and the serial number on the warranty card matches the serial on the camera. I could not be happier with my dealings with Buydig.com. I can wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone and I will most definitely buy from them again.
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