Best Places to Buy

Buying Advice

Our research focused on the following major brick-and-mortar and online retailers: The Apple Store/store.apple.com, Best Buy/bestbuy.com, cdw.com, Circuit City/circuitcity.com, CompUSA/compusa.com, dell.com, gateway.com, hpshopping.com, sonystyle.com, and Staples/staples.com.

To get feedback from as many tech-buying consumers as possible, we developed an online survey (see "Best Buying Advice: Web Stores Whip Retail") and asked nearly 3500 PC World readers about their most recent tech shopping experiences. We asked them which stores and Web sites they shopped at, and then invited them to rate how easily they found advice there, whether they obtained enough information to make a buying decision, and how understandable and accurate the information was. Responses were scaled from 1 to 7, with 1 representing unsatisfactory and 7 excellent.

For our own shopping excursions, we developed a script of technical questions calling for everything from simple factual answers ("What type of batteries does this digital camera take?") to highly technical explanations ("What are the differences between plasma, LCD, and rear-projection TVs?").

Armed with our shopping scenarios, we visited Apple Store, Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, and Staples locations in metropolitan New York; in Springfield and Union, New Jersey; in Austin, Texas; in central and southern New Hampshire; and in the San Francisco Bay Area. We wanted to see how well salespeople knew their PCs, digital cameras, and HDTVs.

Which Stores Score?

The Apple Store, cdw.com, and dell.com top our ratings for technology stores and Web sites, based on the results of our survey of PC World readers and on our own research.

Apple Shines

Mac fans, start gloating. If there's a clear winner in our survey results, it's Apple. Some 63 percent of survey respondents who had visited The Apple Store rated the overall quality of its buying advice a 6 or 7. (The next-closest brick-and-mortar retailer in this category was Circuit City, with ratings of 6 or 7 from a relatively meager 35 percent of visiting respondents.) Apple Store shoppers rated the retailer particularly high in ease of finding buying advice (nearly 70 percent rated it a 6 or 7), and over 70 percent gave it top marks for providing sufficient information to make a buying decision.

Apple's Web store fared nearly as well as its retail outlets: About 69 percent of its shoppers rated its technical information easy to understand, and almost 60 percent said the site provided enough information for them to make a buying decision.

From my own experience at an Apple Store, I can easily see why the company did so well. I dropped by the Salem, New Hampshire, Apple Store one late afternoon in August--and by the time I left, the stars were out, the mall was closing, and I was trying to figure out whether I could make room in my already-cramped home office for a sleek new G5.

In contrast to the cluttered warehouse feel of many tech superstores, The Apple Store had a Zen-like simplicity: white walls; an airy, open floor plan; and convenient product stations where customers could sit down and play with the systems.

It took me more than 15 minutes to capture a salesperson's attention. But when I finally did, he was engaging, knowledgeable, and clearly passionate about the products he was selling. David (who bore a rather eerie resemblance to Steve Jobs--coincidence?) explained each computer system thoroughly, and he accurately answered all of my questions about computers and digital cameras.

Similarly, our shopper in Austin, Texas, reported that Apple Store salesperson Josh answered most questions correctly, though his knowledge of digital cameras seemed somewhat limited.

The downside? Well, The Apple Store doesn't sell PCs, which rules it out for many Windows-centric business users. Apple offers a decent assortment of Mac-compatible tech toys, but if you want to look at a wide variety of products and manufacturers, you'll need to go elsewhere. And while Mac systems are sleek and sexy, they're also pricey: A basic EMac desktop with an integrated flat-screen CRT monitor starts at about $800, and an IMac system with a higher-end CPU runs at least $1300.

PC users get some good news, as well: Just over 60 percent of the dell.com shoppers in our survey rated the overall quality of the site's buying advice a 6 or 7. Dell also scored high in the accuracy of its buying advice, with over 63 percent of respondents giving it top marks. Many readers said they found the site easy to use and the information they needed easy to find; and one survey participant recommended the site's user forums as a great way to learn both the good and the bad about Dell PCs.

Best Buying Advice: Web Stores Whip Retail

According to our reader survey, Apple shines in buying advice for both its retail and its online stores, while dell.com comes in a close second. Except for The Apple Store, retail stores did poorly across the board.