I posted my complaints with RipOff Report, but my experience showed that RipOff Report will delete complaints against DirectBuy, even when no resolution to the complaint is met, so I am posting my complaints here in hopes of enlightening the people who believe sites like RipOff Report that say DirectBuy is an upstanding company.
I went to a DirectBuy open house approximately a year-and-a-half ago with my coupon for a free hotel stay for sitting through the seminar. They were out of vouchers the day I went and they never, ever gave me the incentive. Ever.
At the seminar, they recommend that customers shouldn't compare prices because DirectBuy always has the lowest prices. In a year and a half, I never found even one product that I wanted to purchase that was lower at DirectBuy than I could find by comparison shopping at normal stores. This is not for lack of trying. I remodeled a house from top to bottom, including everything from floors to ceiling fixtures. DirectBuy prices are not the best. The one item I purchased from DirectBuy before I learned to price-compare was a deadbolt. Later that day, I went to my local Home Depot and found the same exact deadbolt on sale for $18 less than the DirectBuy price. The Corporate Headquarters offered me a refund of the $18 on the phone, but has not yet given me my money or any paperwork to get my refund. I'm not holding my breath.
Since I only ever actually purchased one item from DirectBuy and recognized that I was cheated, I don't know the process inside and out, but I do know that they write an 8% profit into every sale. So they don't tell the exact truth when they say that your membership is all the money they make on you. They do make additional profit every time you buy something from them, and the more expensive it is, the more they make. I wonder why they only sell expensive products and ask you not to price-compare. Also, don't believe the prices in the books. The prices in the books are the prices before they add on lots of taxes, fees, and shipping charges.
At the seminar I went to, DirectBuy sold the 3-year membership for roughly $5,000. I am under the impression that this varies from about $4,000-$6,000 depending on the franchise-owner. Subsequent yearly memberships will be $200 per year, unless they change their policy.
My first complaint was with the lack of options. While the DirectBuy seminar promised all of the things you'd need to remodel your house, I was unable to find things like normal air conditioners and materials for building a deck. They had strange air conditioners that would be nice, if you didn't have to run a new, non-standard kind of ductwork across the top of all of your walls. They had one brand of plastic decking, but nothing required to actually build the deck, like struts or posts, and the brand that they offered was more expensive than similar products at local home-improvement stores and was not something I could find anywhere else, so they wouldn't price match.
I was planning to remodel an entire house and a condo over the next year and a half, and based on their claims on 30% kitchen savings alone, I should have made up my membership fee, right? (Estimate 30% off $15,000 for cabinets makes a savings of $4,500 per kitchen.) Wrong. I didn't see that savings on cabinets or on installation. DirectBuy has "Merchant Members" who they recommend to do installations. I had already gotten quotes from other companies on the prices of kitchen cabinets and installation. Their prices on kitchen cabinets were not 30% less than the competition, but the companies that I had quotes from weren't the same brands of cabinets, even though they had the same features (i.e. solid wood construction with dovetail drawers, etc.). There is more on cabinet comparisons from the same company in a paragraph below. I was waffling about my decision, when the owner of the local DirectBuy came over and talked to me. I told her about my remodeling plans on two of my properties and she told me about the kitchen cabinets she just had installed for $300 (note that is not the cabinet price, but the installation price that she paid to a Merchant Member). Now, that was a significant savings compared to the $1000-2000 that most other cabinet installers were charging when I got quotes on their cabinets. Unfortunately, when the Merchant Member that installed her cabinets for a supposed $300 gave me a quote for my condo, it came in for $10,000...for installation only on an installation of 19-feet of upper cabinets and 13-feet of lower cabinets. Can I say RipOff?
So I posted my complaint on RipOff Report. It was immediately removed and an e-mail came to contact Valerie at Corporate Headquarters. She never helped me, but I'll get into that in a little while.
Not only was I getting all of my remodeling done by using normal merchants rather than by using DirectBuy and with materials and labor costing less, but I was also comparing things like televisions. Were DirectBuy prices lower on those? No. Valerie asked me to work with the local manager to get the savings I was promised. The day I shopped for televisions, I was also shopping for some other home-improvement things. The local manager had me put in a paper request for a price-match from the manufacturer. It took twice as long as estimated to get a response and when the response came, they said they wouldn't price match. The local manager told me not to bother putting in a request for a television price-match because the prices vary so often that televisions are often cheaper in local stores. The added benefit of buying a television at a local store is bringing it home with you.
I haven't mentioned yet the turn-around time on an order at DirectBuy. It takes a really long time to get anything from DirectBuy because they have to order it, and in most cases they won't ship it to your door unless you pay an extra fee, which I've noticed is $100 in some cases. So in addition to a long turn-around time, you have to go all the way back to the store, which isn't close to most people's houses because there aren't many of the stores.
I also haven't yet mentioned how useless the website is. I used the website regularly to try to find prices rather than actually going to the store, but unfortunately, most products have a disclaimer that says you need to go to your local DirectBuy to get the price. Even many items in the quarterly catalog don't have prices and require you to visit your "local store". Is it 5 miles or 200 miles for you to get there? Is that local? On a semi-related question, do different DirectBuy locations have different prices? In my experience, they do. I haven't checked many products between two stores, but some of them were the same price and some of them were not.
On the topic of lacking options, I tried to shop everything from toilets to bathtubs to bathroom sinks to vanities to tile to hardwood floors to kitchen cabinets to light fixtures to televisions to staircase banisters to decking to furniture and more. If your goal is to get the best features for the best price, DirectBuy is not your store. DirectBuy only has very high-end, high-price products, which doesn't necessarily guarantee the best features, and DirectBuy has only a couple to a few options in any category, which may or may not be the best product out there, and may or may not be the product you want. If they don't have the product you want, you can't get any savings on it. I was trying to think of a situation where DirectBuy would be a good choice for someone, but I can't think of one. My sentence read something like this until I deleted it (and am now adding it back), "DirectBuy might be a good choice for you if you like really expensive products, very few choices, and waiting a long time to get your stuff."
Now, back to my interactions with the staff. The local manager seemed like she really wanted to help and after a fair amount of time seeing me try to get good prices and fail, she referred me to the local sales manager to get a refund on my membership. This happened after I got a quote on the same exact brand and style of kitchen cabinets from a local retailer as the quote I got from DirectBuy. Now, the comparison isn't really fair because the local retailer comes out to the house and measures the space exactly to ensure that you get the correct sizes and installs them. DirectBuy will not measure the cabinets or install them and will not take responsibility if their Merchant Member measures the cabinets incorrectly. Remember above when I said that the Merchant Member was going to charge $10,000 for installation? Well, this local retailer was going to charge $995 for installation and they guarantee that you'll get the right size cabinets or they'll re-order them at no charge to you. Not so with the Merchant Member, but that isn't even part of the reason I asked for a refund. The price for the cabinets from the local merchant was only 7% higher than the price from DirectBuy, but recall that DirectBuy promises 30% savings on kitchen cabinets. Based on that information, the sales manager said that he would work to get me a refund. Then he made me jump through hoops. I'd already given him the exact quote, but the cabinet list wasn't in the same order. I went to the local merchant and had her put the list in the same order. Then he required a second copy of the exact quote, but that still wasn't good enough. He finally required me to sign a contract and pay a $1,000 deposit with the local merchant, so he could "convince the Corporate Headquarters". I signed the contract with the local merchant, paid the deposit, sent him a copy, and waited for my refund. A month later I still hadn't received it, so I contacted the store again and he didn't work there any more. I was referred back to Valerie at Corporate, who shuttled me through her minions, each of whom offered to help, thought my situation was horrible, and never got me a refund.
(On a side note, the $1,000 I wasted in a deposit to the local merchant, required by the DirectBuy sales manager, made up for the 7% extra cost, so they are my cabinet people, not DirectBuy. They didn't charge a cabinet-design fee, which is currently $200 at DirectBuy, and also offer all the services they offer that DirectBuy doesn't, including 90% savings on installation compared to the DirectBuy Merchant Members.)
My recommendation to anyone who is stuck in a DirectBuy membership is to document absolutely everything you shop for and keep track of the dates, price differences, full names of everyone you spoke to, exactly what promises they made, and have them sign it. Not that Corporate helped me, but they might help you if you have signatures instead of phone conversations. I didn't start documentation until after I had been disappointed time-after-time for an entire year, have never gotten any resolution, lost $18 by paying too much at DirectBuy, $5,000 for buying a DirectBuy membership, and countless time price-comparing and trying to get a refund.
I'm not going to make any recommendation either way to non-members, except that if you do decide to join, list me as your referrer. There are benefits to referring other people. Wink wink! (My interpretation: "Hey, customers, if you can get more people to waste $5,000, we really appreciate it and promise to give you something of value...even though we'll probably never actually provide the incentive."
While I probably left some things out, I think this is a fairly complete description of my experience with DirectBuy.
