When I bought mine, there was literally a $900 difference between Amazon and Best Buy. It was a no brainer.
As far as actual experiences buying, I’ve had 5 HDTV experiences online.
- From geeks.com, I bought a refurbished 37" LCD Vizio tv. Shipped UPS, arrived at my front door fine, worked great. I sold it 5 years later to get a larger TV with more HDMI inputs.
- From ecost.com, I ordered a refurbished 47" Westinghouse TV. Shipped UPS. Arrived broken, but not UPS’s fault - idiots at factory actually repackaged the TV upside down, leaving all the packing materials at the top (ie foam blocks), and the top of the TV screen itself sitting against the bottom of the box
- From ecost.com, I did an exchange of #2. TV arrived UPS and worked fine (packaged correctly). TV itself was crap though - bad speakers, crappy color & brightness.
- From newegg.com, I ordered a 42" TCL LCD tv. Shipped UPS. TV never arrived at all - tracking data showed it was “damaged in shipping” and was sent back to the retailer before I ever saw it. Got a full refund, but had to wait until the TV actually got back to newegg and they processed it.
- From walmart.com, I got a 42" Refurbished Vizio HDTV. Shipped it site-to-store. TV arrived at the store and works great, but Walmart just left the TV on a pallet in the Layaway area where anybody could have walked off with it.
Can you tell us more about this? This has always been my concern - having to return it. I’ve read enough AVSForums to know that returns are really common and not a nightmare, but I never see the details.
(FYI: I think I got that same Westinghouse from ecost.com. Lasted about 2.5 years before the color and blindness went to complete shit. That’s about what I expected though - the reviews for it said it was a risk.)
From ecost.com, I had to call them up and get a return UPS label emailed to me. Gave them my CC# again so they would cross ship me a new TV before the old one got back (and because the website showed the TV out of stock - they had to manually create the order). Note that ecost didn’t offer/allow refunds - only replacement.
Put the UPS shipping label back on and drove the TV to the nearest UPS store. New TV arrived and worked fine, old TV arrived back at Ecost and they removed the second charge from my CC#.