When I received a ReviewMe request from Wirefly last week it really got me thinking. I used to scorch websites ordering a review on ProBargainHunter in the past but this time it is different.
Contrast to some, I am a believer that bad publicity is not something businesses usually make money from, and this is exactly why I am writing this review.
Please accept it as my sincere unbiased opinion and feel free to add your own comments below. But please be constructive. A Wirefly representative will likely come to check on it and I want them to learn something useful from what they find.
The good
Wirefly online store is similar to other websites selling phones online. You can shop by carrier, phone, or service plan. This part of the website is very easy to use. I entered my postal zip code and the list that came back had every carrier I have ever heard of.
The plans are priced at the rates typical to what you will see if you go directly to the service provider. It is the phones where you will find the best deals ever. From my personal bargain hunting experience, Wirefly is one of the names that pops up more often than anything else as far as deals on cell phones are concerned.
In addition to phones Wirefly offers a huge selection of cell phone accessories which you can choose by the phone brand or the carrier.
And finally, they offer a separate section of the website for you, ring-tone junkies. $10 a month will buy you enough credits to annoy excite all your friends with a new collection of 10 regular or 3 music ring-tones every month.
The bad
Wirefly offers great deals on the phones however this is one of the cases when the saying “you get what you pay for” fits perfectly well. I have heard complaints about Wirefly before, and a quick visit to several websites that rank resellers has confirmed my expectations. Here is the roundup:
- Yahoo Shopping gives 2.5 out of 5 points based on 218 reviews
- ResellerRatings gives 6.58 out of 10 points based on 92 reviews
- BizRate reports 77% positive, 4% neutral, and 19% negative reviews
- Epinions gives 3.5 out of 5 points
The feedback that people leave is ranging from “Everything met my expectations.” to “Avoid this company like the plague!!!”. Looking at particular complaints, the majority is customer support related. To save on costs, Wirefly outsources support calls to a call center in India and the reviewers describe the service they receive as “horrible”, “incompetent” and “abysmal”.
The ugly
It is not the great deals what Wirefly is famous for at the bargain forums I frequent. If anyone posts a cell phone deal from Wirefly that requires a mail in rebate, the first comment is usually “forget it, you will never see your rebate”. But don’t take my word for it. Search for Wirefly Rebate Problems on Google and see it for yourself.
Notably the most interesting Google search result comes from Wirefly itself as their official response to Attorney General for the District of Columbia concerning a consumer protection lawsuit related to the use of mail-in rebates.
The final statement in that letter sounds very promising: “Wirefly is proud of its commitment to customer service and will continue to work hard to serve our customers.” I hope the money Wirefly spent on this review is not wasted and it will help them set their priorities as to how exactly the business can be improved.
This post is sponsored by Wirefly via ReviewMe
Wow, great review. One thing though, the noun is spelled “complaint” with a “t.” The verb is “to complain.”
Hi Yan, I’ve been impressed with your transparency about which reviews on your website have been paid for. I’m also good to see that a positive review can’t be “bought” from you.
IMHO, Wirefly is just fine if you know what you want and avoid deals that involve rebates.
I’ve struggled with whether or not to endorse Wirefly in the past. I posted one or two deals from them on my website, but then decided to hold back to see if their reputation improves. Here’s my dilemma: say I post a link to a BlackBerry 7290 & Bluetooth Headset for free with service contract. That’s a good deal with no rebate hassles. But, what if my visitor gets to the Wirefly site and decides the BlackBerry Pearl that’s FREE AFTER REBATE sounds better? If this visitor never heard of Wirefly before, and they trust me to steer them to the good deals, then I just violated their trust.
It’s also important to note that Buy.com sells cell phones and contracts through Wirefly, and Radio Shack’s cell phone page looks conspicuously like Wirefly’s.
Wallet Rehab:
Thanks for the heads up. I fixed the typo.
Markdown Monkey:
I understand your concern and… I really don’t have a solution for it. It is a tricky situation.
Here is an interesting reading from MSN Money explaining the mechanics of mail-in rebate from a business perspective, as well as giving some useful consumer tips: Don’t get ripped off by a rebate ‘deal’
Nice image Yan
I wonder if that phone is actually working…
The image there is a special for my Russian readers.
I am going for a trip to Ukraine next June and it is all I can think of right now.
Yan, I own stock in this company which is why I subscribe to google alerts about them and saw this post today. This looks like a terrific blog and I agree your review is extremely fair.
For what it’s worth I thought I’d clear a few things up. First of all, the fact that the wireless sections of buy.com and radioshack.com look like the same company shouldn’t be “suspicious.” There’s nothing hidden here. Wire Fly is owned by Inphonic, which basically owns the online cell phone category. Their main business is running everybody else’s cell phone stores (they literally run thousands of them). So you’re buying from them whether you order from bestbuy.com, radioshack.com, buy.com, overstock.com, motorola.com, samsung.com, blackberry.com, lg.com, or just about any other site that comes up when you search for cellphones on google.
The reason everybody uses this company is because activating wireless phones is an extremely complicated business, and for better or worse they do it better than anybody. That’s why I bought the stock. Nobody else does what they do (a good criterion for investing in any company, by the way).
Speaking as a customer, I have ordered from them twice and had a great experience both times. But I have good credit. More than 50% of the orders they get are rejected by the carrier because of credit history or bad information in the application, and this company has to then try to get ahold of the customer to fix things so that the phone can be shipped, then they become a middleman, trying to work things out between the carrier and the customer. I would bet that the negative reviews are from people who fall into these categories. People don’t understand this when they place an order and I’m sure that’s why the reviews are so all over the place.
As for rebates, they took a big hit in 2005 over their mismanagement of rebates. If you listen to their investor calls (again, they are a public company so all of this is public) they’ve discussed this extensively. As the story goes, they outsourced rebate processing to a third party that screwed things up and in switching vendors they created backlogs and lost rebates and couldn’t quickly respond to inquiries from customers and all kinds of mess that led to them switching back to their previous vendor and it was basically mismanaged and a PR disaster that took a year to unwind. They got sued and ended up settling with the attorney general. But this was all for stuff that happened in 2005 and before. Listening to their investor calls, I for one believe with all the scrutiny placed on their rebates that they have to be squeaky clean now.
Anyway, I read so much about this company and usually there’s no forum for response, so I appreciate being able to share another point of view.
Inphonic Investor - Great post.
I have to agree with you that it appears Wirefly wants to get past the bad rebate reputation. Unfortunately, bad news travels faster and farther than good news. It may still take some time before that reputation changes.
Regarding the “suspicious” comment. I assume you are referring to my post where I used the word “conspicuously.” I was using that word to mean “obviously” or “noticeably,” not “suspiciously.” I am incredibly impressed with Wirefly’s web interface and what must be going on “under the hood.” Any online reseller would have to think long and hard about why they would want to build their own cell phone shopping cart when they could partner with Wirefly instead.
Inphonic Investor:
Thanks for your great insight. Bad reputation is very hard to fix. It is in human nature to open up more easily when you get burned by bad service than to advocate good service. I noticed exactly this pattern when I was reviewed ResellerRatings. Companies who didn’t solicit customer feedback via RR premium program tended to get very low rank since people would only go to RR to complain, but never to praise.
Looking at the same RR ratings, Wirefly rank over the last 6 months is significantly higher than the overall lifetime rank (6.58 vs. 4.17). I hope this is not just a coincidence.
Many readers of this blog are people who maintain deals/coupons sites and they might as well be hesitating about listing affiliate offers from Wirefly. It is in everyone’s interest to see Wirefly customer support & rebate processing improve. It is a triple win for customers, affiliates and Wirefly employees & investors.
I bought my Blackberry from them in ‘05. What a horrible company. The first sign I got that something was seriously wrong was that the area code of the phone number they assigned me wasn’t even in my state!
Tried calling them, couldn’t get through. Called T-Mobile, who told me this place was a mess and offered to port my old number. A couple months later Wirefly called and had a fit, said they were charging me $250.00 and were very rude about it. I told them feel free, I’d be disputing it, they said they had a contract with me.
So I filled out a form with my credit card company (which immediately suspends the charge), never heard another thing about it. Apparantly the $250 was some kind of scam.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been some kind of class action lawsuit against them, they are asking for it.
They didn’t end up coming after you for the $250 you owed them? It says very clearly in their terms of service that any changes you make to your service (including your phone number, duh) can result in their trying to collect back their original discount subsidy. This is discussed ad nauseum all over the internet. I LIke how people tend to cry “scam” whenever they don’t like something or they didn’t read the rules. But I guess the trick is simply to enlist the help of your credit card company. suckers. LOL
Wirefly does offer several deals for phones that don’t require a mail in rebate. That have several deals that offer instant discounts and customers pay nothing up front. Even better they have deals where customers actually make money. I recently reviewed there top deals and there were a few that customers that paid nothing up front to get the phone and they had $70 or $80 in mail-in rebates. It seems like some people have had a bad experience with them, but most have a great experience and get a really good deal on a phone.
I went to a kiosk tonight in the mall that said Sprint/Nextel. I talked with the rep. for about 30 min.s and he never disclosed to me that he was working for a third party company called Wirefly. All of what I am hearing sounds suspicious. I was impressed about the price of the phones, but the one I liked has a mail in rebate. Every phone that I looked at had a mail in rebate.
I have a simple question about a deal my wife is looking at through WireFly.. if the phone is free (with rebates) and the service plans cost the same as the carrier how the heck does WireFly make money?? It is very suspicious not to know how a business makes money.
I guess I can surmise that AT&T for example provides phone services at a reduced rate to WireFly so they make money there. Is it as simple as that?
Rob, I would think the carrier pays WireFly commission for each customer they bring to them