Got A Queasy Feeling
Written: Jan 20 '01 (Updated Jan 20 '01)
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The Bottom Line
The site is shabby and makes me too uncomfortable to consider spending a large portion of my income with them.
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I've bought few diamonds in my time, so was a bit nervous to start out with on this shopping expedition and Diamonds USA did nothing to quell my uneasiness.
The home page appears with a series of drop down selection boxes for shape, size, color, clarity, and price. Not really sure what I was looking for this did me no good whatsoever. There are also six tabs at the top of the page: Discovering Diamonds, Diamond Shapes, Our Special Offers, News, Payment and About Us.
Being a novice I followed 'Discovering Diamonds' only to discover to brief and poorly written paragraphs on how diamonds are mined. Not very helpful :(
Next I checked the 'About Us' section where I found general advertising babble rife with typos and poor grammar. There was even a small section on two of the cutters visit to Africa that came off like a poorly designed personal vacation site. Not very comforting when I'm counting on their expertise and professionalism.
Heading back to the homepage I find a link to 'References', another page of poor English that has obviously not been updated in since at least 1999(!). They claim to have a perfect record (no complaints) at Public Eye, but when I checked at epubliceye.com, there were, in fact two complaints recently lodged against the company over grading/service issues.
Just about to give up all together as I've still been unable to find any actual diamonds to browse through (inventory seems to only be available through the search engine) I decide to check the 'News' section to see if perhaps the site is undergoing construction or some such. Much to my surprise the News page did not contain site or company news, but rather world news that they apparently thought I would find relevant to my buying decisions, though I saw no worth in its presence.
Completely frustrated at this point, I finally clicked into special offers thinking I could perhaps slip from there into the primary inventory database. No such luck :(
The prices here did seem to be substantially lower then other diamond sites I have checked since for diamonds of the same general stats. However, one of the oft sited reasons for buying from this site is that they have photos of each diamond. Alas, this was untrue as many of the diamonds did not have photos.
Finally, I 'stormed' off the site annoyed and very disgruntled. Not to mention the aforementioned queasy. Something just doesn't seem right here.
Luckily, my next stop was Treasures by R.J. (niceice.com) which I can't recommend highly enough. But then, that review is available in their section.
Recommended:
No
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About the Author
Member: Aahz
Location: ...Behind The Curtain
Reviews written: 60
Trusted by: 31 members
About Me: Aahz has returned to Epinions after a short 7 year hiatus. Why? We'll see together...
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