the corner office

It's time to invest in a new monitor, and this (shock! horror!) will be my first major online purchase of something that can drop on the floor and break.

To date my monitors have always been relatively cheapo models, but this time around I'm aiming for a (fairly) well-spec'ed 19". I figured that since I spend the majority of my life staring at the damned thing, I may as well not skimp. I'm waiting for some feedback from one or two local online stores, but it's a trade-off between a Philips and an LG.

Online shopping for computer hardware in ZA is not without frustration. Who to buy from is the first question. Doing some Googling over .za tech forums, a few names crop up, and those are the folks I've been looking at. No probs there. It's when you hit their sites that the frustration really sets in. The two main gripes I have are (1) poorly labelled/identified products and (2) limited product ranges.

Problem one is vaguely named and labeled products. "LG 19" Flatron monitor". Not good enough, chaps; that covers a host of models, so it's impossible to Google for product reviews and manufacturer spec sheets. I've now mailed two sites asking them to clarify what product it is they're actually selling. That's plain inexcusable, even if they do acknowledge the problem in their FAQ (as one site does.)

The second problem is mainly a symptom of our small local market. Ideally you'd like to line up 4 or 5 retailers and see who charges what for a given make and model, but right now, that ain't happening. Some sites sell only one or two brands, and everybody's carrying only a small subset of the models actually available. This is especially so for the slightly more pricey stuff. And do those subsets match those of other suppliers, or even the subsets listed on each manufacturer's South African site? Noooo. Sheesh!

Having said that, the upsides of this smaller market is that reputation and customer service matters and at least some of these guys know it. To their credit, both sites that I've mailed requesting product clarifications have generated a reply from a human being almost immediately, and both after hours. So their hearts are in the right place, just the execution is shaky.

The only other gripe I have is warranty/returns policies. All sites have 'em to varying degrees of detail, but none of the sites spell things out clearly enough for a paranoid newbie shopper like me. I want to know the procedure, the caveats, the requirements. The last thing I want to do is lay out 2 grand on a monitor that flakes out and only then find out that I'll have to pack the thing up and ship it to Cape Town at my own expense and wait 2 months before the problem gets sorted.

So that's my advice to local retailers. Make it easy to identify and compare products, and anticipate every concern and worry that a potential customer may have. For every person who fires off an email trying to clarify something, another 5 don't bother, or move on to another site. The more people you keep at your site, and the more hassle-free you make things, the more sales you make, the faster your market grows. Not to mention that the less time you spend answering emails, the more time you can devote to growing your business. With higher volumes and profits, comes larger and more diverse product lines. Business Economics 101. Herendethelesson.

Aaaanyway. Hopefully I'll be able to make a decision on what monitor to buy, by tomorrow. When I've done that I'll throw up some links with my impressions of each site.