When the Price is Too Good…

We needed to buy 25 full-version licenses of a certain software product this week. After checking a few sites I decided to give my CDW contact a quick call. We chatted and after a couple iterations we had a quote that seemed pretty decent.

A co-worker suggested I give Amazon a look before making the order. I thought he was nuts, but just for grins checked it out — they were about $600 cheaper (CDW was at $10,200) which is a healthy enough difference to give one pause. Wow!

I shot my CDW rep a note and he was quickly able to beat the Amazon item price. However… There’s the matter of $400 or so dollars of state tax. No tax on Amazon’s order (I wonder if the online Sales/Use tax thing will ever really get squared away?).

Here’s the kicker: I went through the order process at Amazon and even took the upgrade to free 2nd day shipping. After the order was complete I noticed that while I did indeed have 2nd day shipping, it wasn’t due to ship for 4 weeks!

Well geeze… I guess I should’ve checked that first, huh?

I canceled and called my CDW guy and he got the order. I expect to have it next Monday or Tuesday.

I probably don’t need to spell out the morale of the story, but don’t forget to check on when you can expect to get an item when comparing prices.

If you’re curious, the order was for 25 copies of Adobe Acrobat Pro. It was interesting to note that with CDW I was getting volume licensing (TLP?) pricing (one CD, 25 serial numbers) vs. 25 full boxes from Amazon…

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