Whenever we write a product review on the Home Cinema Buyer website, as well as giving you an unbiased, down to earth and hopefully useful rundown of the product and its capabilities, we always like to include a short list of online stores where you can buy the item. This saves you having to hunt around for the best deal and earns us a small commission to help keep the site running.
Many websites will just list the stores you can buy the item for the cheapest price. Whilst that has its benefits, we also know that when it comes to an expensive purchase such as a home cinema system, our readers sometimes don’t mind paying more to get better customer service, if something were to go wrong for example.
So our pricing tables are a little different and have more of a mixture of retailers: those with renowned good customer service levels, those with competitive prices, and those who do a bit both! For example, we always try to list John Lewis because their customer service is renowned for being among the very best, and Amazon.co.uk are a good example of a retailer who have good customer service levels and have competitive prices. We also like to support independent retailers too, such as Multizone Audio Visual who are a good example of an independent home cinema specialist retailer.
As well as service levels, there are other factors to consider when weighing up the best deal. For example, John Lewis include a 5 year guarantee with their televisions, something which can cost well over £100 if you buy a separate extended warranty from some of the other well known retailers. And Amazon offer free delivery on their products – an extra that is often assumed to be included but can cost up to £20 at other stores.
Listing retailers that are only the cheapest doesn’t always reflect the true cost, so we try to include additional notes with the benefits the retailer offers that can really affect the full value of the deal.
So there is a little bit of background on how we choose which retailers we choose to show on the pricing tables. We feel there is a good variety between the big well known brands, to the smaller online only retailers, and we hope, and try as far as possible to ensure they are all reputable and will give you a good end to end service, whoever they may be.