DirectBuy

With the ability to order using the website, making a purchase has become a lot easier also. In the past, you had to go into the store and arrange a time with one of the customer service reps. Now, a lot of items are available for online ordering and then for pick-up at the club. I’ve also used the concierge service over the phone and the web agent, and that has been good too.

But there are other things on the catalog that are being updated only once every six months. There are specific times, especially for electronics, when I'd go on to the website and notice that by the time I pay for the handling and shipping fee, DirectBuy’s price is more expensive than at Best Buy. Because of the technology, the price changes quite a bit. So they have to be careful and make sure that their catalogs are reflective of changes that are going on in the marketplace. That aside, certain things are very price competitive and the quality has been quite good as well. Sometimes things might get a bit damaged in the shipping but usually, I'll notice it right at the time of delivery so I won't take delivery of it. But I also tend to focus on stuff from good manufacturers.

They don't offer a lot of direct home delivery in Canada though. You have to go to the store but a lot of the real estate has closed over the past number of years. If the store was a 10-hour drive, I probably wouldn't be a DirectBuy customer anymore. But there's still a brick and mortar DirectBuy store relatively close to where I am and I like that. It's nice to have a store that's within a decent distance of my house.

I furnished my dad’s entire house with Overstock so that was a whole lot of money that we didn’t save because we didn’t go to DirectBuy. But the prices were prices on DirectBuy with shipping. I found the same bed on Wayfair and it was the same price, only shipping was free and delivery was within three days as opposed to three weeks. The lead time between when DirectBuy gets things to us and when things locally get to us is something that DirectBuy still needs to work on. We were remodeling our two bathrooms upstairs and we purchased the valves for hooking up our bathroom on Amazon because our job was at a standstill due to the lead time.

I bought a free-standing tub, shower fixtures and undermount sinks through DirectBuy. They were more expensive but we got a better value for our money. I absolutely love April, our designer. She picked out a sectional for us and it took a very long time for it to get here, but it was beautiful. If you use April, DirectBuy is the best thing in the world, but you’re gonna have to plan ahead. The valves were ordered way early and April did that but the manufacturer was very slow for that. I’ve been a month with no bathroom and a week with nobody here because now I have to get on the plumber’s waiting list.

The $5,000 one-time entry fee at DirectBuy is very steep and then we have to pay $100 a year to renew. The reps in the showroom said, “If you walk out the door, you can never be a DirectBuy member again.” I don’t know if that was true or that was our sales people, but Kudos to April. Give her a phone call. We were ready to write DirectBuy off. However, I don’t think that we’ve even recouped our $5,000 entry fee yet which was our savings.

Now, we moved into a new state and we are renovating the house. In some areas, DirectBuy has contractors and builders that they would recommend and they have designers to do a free in-house design but they don’t have those within the area where we live now. Also, DirectBuy got rid of all the agents where I could look at the stuff and they could order it for me. Now, they have a concierge that we can talk to and give us the information. If we need samples, I was told that they can be mailed. But as soon as the construction in our house will start, I will call DirectBuy and pay the fee so that there is some type of a project coordinator that I can deal with.

We’ve been with DirectBuy for 10 years and the quality of their products is very good. We’re happy with the two kitchen cabinets we purchased. We also have a fridge, a stove, a microwave and couches. I have told numerous people to sign up with DirectBuy if they’re doing any renovation, especially for kitchens. We saved a pile of money on our kitchen and that more than paid for the membership.

When they "found" them they said that they couldn't install them for six weeks because they were too busy, You would think that my appointment would get priority as there was an error that needed to be corrected. The woman from Topps Installation was so incredibly rude and uncooperative, especially considering the error was made by them. She said that she would find me another installer and failed to do so. I've contacted Decorview/Direct Buy several times for a solution. They did in fact find me a new installer but he has yet to receive the missing blinds. Only the one that was remade.

Now... Topps Installation claims that they again lost the missing shades that they were supposed to send to the new installer and now they have to be remade and re-sent to the new install guy. In a nutshell, no one has been helpful. Three months later and I still have Home Depot paper shades hanging in two of my bathrooms and a broken blind hanging in my master bedroom. I will be canceling my membership with Direct Buy as they have nothing to help rectify the situation.

I did a thousand bucks worth of Kohler. But initially, I had looked in the book and I looked online but I couldn’t find the stuff that I wanted. So I talked to a concierge person and they looked it up. I’d already had quotes from Kohler directly so I had all the part numbers. The DirectBuy people looked them all up and figured everything up for me. Then they gave me a price to either have the stuff delivered to the warehouse, which is about a 40-minute drive away from me, or to have it shipped straight to my house. There was only about a $3 difference. There was no way I was gonna beat traffic and I told them to just ship it to the house. Everything was great and without the concierge people, the experience would have been a little more difficult.

On the other hand, my daughter’s daughter wanted all GE appliances and the package was about $70,000. Immediately, my daughter came to me saying that they had gone to the appliance stores and got prices. She wanted me to go on DirectBuy and find out. I thought DirectBuy would certainly carry GE but no. But you can’t win all the time. The latest ones I bought were the brand new kitchen cabinets and vanities. I had a problem with the cabinet company where they kept sending the wrong stuff but it had nothing to do with DirectBuy. The list price was about $58,000 and it cost me about $30,000 from DirectBuy. Those savings will cover a few years.

While fixing the mistakes the job will drag on and on for months. They do not care as you have already paid up front. They will make a claim to the company for parts that are wrong but that will take time. If you are paying a contractor to install, he will be back often and your kitchen will be partial complete. They are not responsible for any of these costs. You are not dealing directly with the manufacture and the person you are dealing with is only moving emails back and forth. Think carefully before using this service.

I have a new condo in DC and I'm having all the furniture done through DirectBuy. I just got a phone call from a delivery company and they're going to deliver a batch for me next Friday. They tried to fit it into my schedule which was very nice. Everyone has been very helpful. If they couldn't get what you want, they match it up as best as they can. We've had a very positive experience. My son and daughter-in-law are gonna join DirectBuy too because they're gonna buy a new house.

Purchasing something through DirectBuy is easy and the quality of the products that we have received was great. The hard part is making sure that we have all our facts and that we are able to see color swatches before we put the order in, and making sure that we're matching up our purchases properly or that the way it looks online is actually how it is. We have go to other stores to do that and it's not always convenient. A lot of times, the other stores know about DirectBuy and they don't put the actual item or company on the item so we really have to know or hope that they have in stock what we're looking for. We have to be sure of what we're ordering because we can't return it. The initial warehouse had a lot of people helping customers place the order and looking up things but that's unnecessary. No one can help you other than showing color samples from different companies.

What the company originally was was great, there was a staff you could speak with, designers that would help you pick out items that complimented your home, and would price match everything before they even wrote up an order for you to sign. Not to mention a single stop shopping experience where you could look at items in person, there was value and service that was, to me, well worth the original 5k+ cost. Now I get to travel about 200 miles just to look at 2 different tile companies, and 2 different bathroom showrooms to look at items I may like.

Since they closed down all of their showrooms, and moved to only Internet sales, they just plain suck. They don't price match automatically, you have to find better deal and wait for days while they confirm with their contacts that they can attempt to price match, in the mean time the deal you are trying to price match may end before you get an answer and would be stuck paying a higher rate... But they sell at "direct from Manufacturer prices" that is comical as any simple google search will find prices that beat them all the time. Unless you are buying furniture and lots of it, there is absolutely no value in this club, as there are online stores that after price match they still can't beat because they price match before Shipping/Tax/Handling costs.

I have spent over 40k on renovations to my house this year, of which 23k roughly was spent on merchandise I should be able to buy thru this club. Not only did I find better prices online, I found much better service thru the sites I purchased from. Lightning fast delivery compared to the 4 - 12 week time frames this company gives. In the past year I have made a total of 3 purchases, of which my last one is now on week 9, and I just received an email that it isn't expected until mid october, so I will now be canceling and buying elsewhere. Which brings my total purchases down to 2, both of which had to be price matched because direct buy prices suck, and often are beat out even at the retail store price.

In regards to their Travel program, if you are a member don't fall for their Travel program. Most if not all trips that I or my family took we were able to find better rates thru Travelocity, Trivago, and Priceline type of websites. Or if you are a Costco member, they have much better rates as well. They will try to lure you in with, "The cost is mitigated by the free trip vouchers you get." What they don't tell you is the "resorts" you have access to are timeshare properties and make you sit thru (for me was 4 hours) of high pressure sales pitches about owning a place that you will still get to pay 200 a night to stay at rooms. If you don't travel much they will tell you the vouchers are good anytime and don't expire (you have 2 years to use them or lose them). They also definitely don't let you know it carries with it a 2nd renewal rate for membership.

Just do yourself a favor and stay away from this company, outside of furniture they haven't offered me a single product I wasn't able to find online for around the same or cheaper than they were, most of those stores also don't have to charge taxes or shipping. Let alone everything your purchase carries a 8% handling fee the club charges to allow you access to these "direct from manufacturer prices". Just to put into perspective, even if an online store isn't item cost cheaper (most of what I bought this past year was cheaper at the item) Online store 170.00 no shipping no tax, receive it within a week Direct buy 150.00 + 22.50 shipping +12.00 (8% handling) + 10.33 sales tax = 194.83 (real recent purchase cost) (at 9 weeks and received notice it at best will be mid October to receive it).

I would recommend DirectBuy for someone who is planning on making big purchases. If you’re not gonna use it for something big, you’re not gonna see the same kind of savings. Still, it's very reasonably priced. Even though we didn’t buy anything for many years in a row, we still feel like we’ve gotten value out of it. The quality of the products has been excellent as well.

DirectBuy membership is expensive, so it's not for everyone. Our projects are coming to an end so I'm not sure whether we will continue to pay the annual membership. I would also recommend them to friends, but they have to make sure that they're gonna use it to get the benefits of the membership. Unless they're doing a big project, I wouldn't think it's worth the membership. Nonetheless, we've been members for 10 years or more now and it's been good particularly the last couple of years.

We renovated our own house and purchased appliances, a bed, couches and flooring. We bought barbecues and TVs too. The products we've bought from DirectBuy are lasting as long as anything else that we would’ve bought. We've been members since about 2000 and I would highly recommend it for someone who's got a young family and is needing stuff for their house, is remodeling their house or building a house.

When we first got in DirectBuy, they had local warehouses that you would have to go in and go through volumes of books to find what you wanted. You would have to camp at the showroom and go through their library. It was not online and it was insane. Then, they upgraded and went to the online website. Navigating of the site since has improved greatly and has become a lot simpler.

They still had local people that would come out and talk to you about your cabinet program and looking at your layout. We had someone who had her own business and it was an absolute nightmare. I had sat down over at Lowe's where they had their cabinet center and since I designed my house, I knew all the dimensions. I knew exactly what I wanted as far as layout. After a month, this girl still didn't have a preliminary design for me. And she was running up costs because she wasn't getting it done and she had to re-address things.

I called and talked to the supervisor that oversaw that department in DirectBuy and explained I was very, very unhappy and why. I sent her copies of all our correspondence and why it was a mess. She quickly turned this over to Jeff. I sent him everything I had and in less than a day, he had all of the design work and AutoCAD done. Everything was back to me for review in a day. He's an absolute pro at doing cabinets and he just blew my mind. He was probably one of the most efficient and talented subcontractors. The man knew his job inside and out and did it all via the internet because he was out at Florida. Everything went in absolutely perfect.

Also, I started a project when we just moved into our house for six months. DirectBuy was under an old business format and everything was fixed four to eight weeks from purchase to delivery. But they have addressed and got expediting shipping. Now, I just purchased some fitness equipment that showed up in a week. So, they're making some changes but you have to be a little bit more patient. There are plenty of really big savings that could be had through DirectBuy. I was able to find some competitive pricing. I have a chandelier with an enclosed housing with a fan inside of it. It's the same manufacturer that I saw at Progressive Lighting. It was always $400 less. And I saved probably $30,000 on my cabinets. The savings was just phenomenal. We have other properties that we may think about building a ski place out in Taos by New Mexico and for that reason, we will maintain our membership.

After all this time DirectBuy customer service is giving us the same run around excuses we got a month ago. The bedroom set was made in Indiana but shipped to North Carolina for consolidation. Now they are using the excuse they don't have drivers to go to their warehouse in Freedom, PA. If they picked up in Indiana they could have easily drop shipped in Freedom, PA because that would not have taken them out of their way by at most 100 miles. Now that the bedroom set is in North Carolina they are saying it will take another week or 2 before it goes to their Freedom, PA warehouse. BUT that doesn't mean they will then load it for "White Glove Service" so who knows how long that will take.

By the end of this fiasco I'm estimating we won't see this furniture of another month or more. DirectBuy has already ruined why we needed the furniture and we don't really care if we get it anymore. As a matter of fact we would just rather CANCEL the order and get our OVER $3,000.00 back that they have had since APRIL! We are looking at completely renovating our home and at this point DirectBuy would be the last place I would use! Very dissatisfied customers.