I ordered all mine direct from the K&F online store and they shipped from China within a reasonable time frame. (couple of weeks IIRC)
I actually prefer to buy from local retailers but for some of this cheaper stuff I give in to the ease of ordering… 
I’ve not ordered from them directly; I think I got most of my stuff via eBay and/or Amazon.
The order I’m waiting on was placed by my wife from B&H, as my birthday present (January) the better part of two months ago …I think.
Well Steven, your experience with local suppliers is more positive than mine in Tasmania. I prefer to shop on line so I don’t get ripped off. I always check out a few suppliers and as long as the company is reliable I buy from the cheapest normally. I have had very positive experiences with Amazon. Recently I bought my Canon R7 from them. The price quoted was about $AU2400 but when I went to pay at the checkout the price was just under $2200. So I paid and then the full price showed up on my credit card and I realised the difference was sales tax had been added. I wasn’t upset, but Amazon contacted me and stated that I had been shown the wrong price at check out and then refunded the difference. If that wasn’t nice enough, when I was flying out the country the Government refunded my sales tax on the camera again. So ended up being out of pocket about $1800 for the camera. Win win for me.
Same here. I buy from Amazon even if I can find marginally lower prices elsewhere, because their customer service is very smooth: packages arrive on time as predicted at the time of ordering them (in 99% of cases), returns are hassle-free (also in cases when the product is not defective per se, but the description is incorrect), and the rare problem is resolved quickly with an apology and usually a coupon. Very few online retailers match this consistently.
I habe quit using Amazon a few years ago, and used other online retailers instead. Whoever is cheapest, really. I quit because Amazon treats their employees poorly, and is full of false advertising, outright fraud, which makes it almost impossible to search for products.
I have only had positive experiences so far with other online retailers. Orders are handled quickly, support hotlines have actual people on call, and problems were resolved neatly. Which has not been my experience with Amazon.
At first I thought life without Amazon would be difficult. But I had it wrong. It turned out easier, for the most part. At least here in Germany. Shipping and returns are a much bigger headache in the US, or so I hear.
+1
For me - they are hit and miss. Often I see items that I can’t say the origin. For example - an item that is for the US market would be in Canada. And some are gray market - originally destined for Asia. In itself there is nothing bad but when it comes to warranty - issues can be expected.
There is no known to me way to search for something like durability or sturdiness - heavy duty - you name it. So - sometimes what can happen is to buy an item that is flimsy and you end up disposing it. For this reason - there are items that I just avoid (I wouldn’t want to loose 6-7 years warranty for a lens - as an example).
On the positive side - you can find deals sometimes (and I bough few of these). The last one was a set of Tiffen filters.
Just - don’t expect that if it was good once it is going to be good all the times (or vice versa).
Amazon allows other companies to sell on the amazon site. So watch out; you can always check who the seller is.
I don’t buy much from Amazon, as they are not present in Switzerland. Most of what I buy are Kindle ebooks.
Periodically see this thread go by, think “I’ve got a good one”, and forget to go back to post it…
After 20 years in the Air Force and 3 years at a university I found myself out of work. Wife said, “Bills to pay!!!”, so I got on it, dropping my resume in every defense contractor’s resume dumpster. Only interest I got was from Boeing, first call to go to Huntsville, AL (no, thanks…), then, to Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. Long story short, got that job and planned to move to the middle of the Pacific. One of the things wife and I discussed was, “tropical island… need pictures!!!”, so we splurged (company wasn’t paying yet) on a Nikon CoolPix camera for me to take over.
Got there (wife and son to join in a month and a half, another long story), on my first day I got on my bike to ride around and take a few pictures of stuff to send home, household reconnaissance as it were. Pedaled for a bit to the beach (all of 500’ from the house), unmounted from the bike and went to pull the camera out of my pocket and promptly dropped it on the asphalt. It made about 5 nice pieces, which I brought back to the crib, informed my wife at the next phone call. Never got a single image from it.
When she eventually showed up, she brought a HP point-and-shoot, which we still have, unbroken 
. With it I took many pictures, including one of my favorites, even over any I’ve done with the D7000 or Z 6:
Looking out over the lagoon from Emon Beach (about where I massacred the ill-fated CoolPix), walking figure is one of our friends’ daughters. Sunsets were like this about 80% of the time, just had to watch out for the rats that would come out almost immediately after the sun sunk below the horizon…
I still run across CoolPix parts in my collections of stuff, prompting me to recall, “dang…”
Nice story, Glen, engagingly told. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve had to return a few things, but each time it worked out OK. Amazon is all about quantity and variety. Quality is the responsibility of the buyer and can be a challenge to determine at times. I can find good things on Amazon and buy from time to time, but the trick is picking the wheat from the chaff. A far better (more accurate) search and filtering capability would be a HUGE help.
Amazon… I send my selections to my wife, and she buys them on her Prime account with her free shipping. Mostly materials and small tools, e.g., I’m eating machining endmills like potato chips, so I order the 5-packs from god-knows-who on Amazon for about $21US. I have my own account for my Kindle, get gift cards for Christmas, load them up and periodically buy books for travel entertainment.
I do have a few direct sources for ordering, NikonUSA for refurbished lenses, B&H for the rest of my photography, MicroMark and Sherline for tools. B&H has done right by me, bought an extra battery for the Z 6, they then had a recall, and ended up with a third battery when they sent the recall replacement and didn’t want the other one in return, which still works just fine…
Thanks for writing that sentence, Terry! Everyone has a use for it…
I rarely use Amazon. Where possible, I buy from a local camera shop, as long as the price is in the ballpark. If you never buy from your camera shop, it might not be there when you really need it. Same goes for things like bicycle shops. Meanwhile, my wife is a hard-core Amazon user and my daughter won’t touch it with a ten foot pole.
I live on an Island, albeit a very big one called Tasmania. Good camera stores are hard to come by here. For instance I wanted to buy a light weight Manfrotto travel tripod and I could buy it on the mainland for $99 and the local store wanted $199 and when I asked them to try and match the price they made me feel so unwelcome and suggested they could take about $20 off. After a little bit of hardball with the store manager I paid $129 but the experience alienated me as a customer.
In comparison I sit at my computer and do a quick google search and I get prices from real stores across Australia, overseas or places like Amazon. I often buy from a store based in Melbourne so I am supporting a real store in that case. They offer real service, real advice and realistic prices. For the Australian readers that store is digiDirect. There are other good Australian stores with an online presence.
However, my Amazon experience is 100%. I have prime membership which gets me Video streaming and free delivery for a very affordable annual fee. I often have items shipped from the US with free shipping and delivery speed that rivals Australia Post’s delivery within the country. I also get items from Amazon Australia within just a couple of days which is great living on an island. The returns service is nothing short of brilliant in my experience. I had a perfectly good item that proved unsuitable to my needs. No questions asked I was supplied a shipping slip at no cost and I returned the item to the post office minus the original manufacturers packaging as that had not been retained. By the time I had returned home from the Post Office I had the credit already applied to my Amazon account. That sort of service gives such peace of mind to me. Recently I bought a SSD for my laptop knowing if it didn’t work in my laptop I could just send it back. In comparison I bought a laptop battery from another online supplier, I put it into my computer and it didn’t fix my problem. I am stuck with the battery, but if that had been Amazon I could have returned it. BTW, my local computer store wanted $100 minimum plus the cost of the battery to see if that was my problem so again online was the best answer for me.
if (0 < local_camera_store)
{
buy_local();
}
else
}
amazon();
/*
bhphotovideo();
adorama();
*/
}
Man, I’ve potentially hung myself out to dry here, trying to be cute. Pulling C from my brain after 20 years of no coding is highly risky.
At any rate what I’m trying to say is, I have no local camera store, so… 
After years of kindling, I decided to give a competitor a try. To my delight, I found the Kobo E-readers to be vastly better than the Kindles in almost every way. Better layout, better built, better UI, custom fonts, book cover as lock screen, ePub compatible. I love these things! Furthermore, I found Kindle ebooks often apparently derived from automated scans with little error correction (“m” instead of “rn”, and similar errors), which was not the case in other ebook stores. Having access to more than one bookstore, and libraries, is useful too. To say nothing of the mad utility of archive.org and libgen for accessing out-of-print books.
To come back to the thread topic: when I bought my first Kobo, I gave the old Kindle to my wife. She put it in her backpack for a trip we were going on. It never made it to the destination. A water bottle crashed into the screen and destroyed it, before she even had a chance to read a single book on it.
That’s even worse than mine! 
Brick and mortar stores outside big cities are in a difficult position. When turnover is low for a particular item (less than one sale / 3–6 months, but it depends on the industry), their working capital is tied up in stock so they have to make large returns on occasional sales, and there is a significant chance that the manufacturer will come out with a new version at which point they have to discount the item. So, while 100% markups over online prices are a bit extreme, 50% is not unusual.
Photography has become one of those weird markets where customers splurge $1500 for a premium compact even though most people could replicate something lighter from a MILC body they have at home at a fraction of the cost (eg Fujifilm just came out with the X100VI to satisfy demand for this), yet having decided to make the purchase they look for the cheapest buying option, even it if just saves a few bucks. A lot of people will not buy items in that have been opened (but of course not damaged), so allowing customers to handle the goods, which is a main advantage of buyign local, is costly too. Selling locally is becoming something only very densely populated areas can maintain.
To clarify, this store was part of an Australian wide store brand and is the only dedicated camera store in our capital city. So it would have reasonable buying power. I also went to this store when I wanted to buy a Olympus TG4 camera. At the time the mainland stores were selling for around $599 and they were asking $699. I asked them if they could do a better price and they weren’t interested. I then wandered into digiDirect store in Melbourne when I was there on a work trip. I asked what price and they said $513 so I bought one there and then. This same store in my home town sells unsuspecting buyers polarizing filters as protection filters. I may like trying to support local businesses but they still need to earn my custom. Anyway digiDirect is still a local bricks and mortar store, but just not in my town. They offer free shipping so I always look at their prices before making decisions.