Ontime, quality products, and great specials are the hallmark of Dell Home
Written: Aug 28 '05
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Dell Home is the online presence of the company started by Michael Dell, Dell Computers. Dell Home is geared mostly towards the home user, while other areas of their sites cater to the small business owner and corporate accounts. Perusing the site in total will show many of the same products available with different configurations, pricing and support options. Dell Home will generally have the best pricing structure and widest variety of coupons/rebates available, meaning that most of the general public will take advantage of the Dell Home site over the business-related sites.
The Dell Home site sells computers and computer parts for both desktop and notebook systems. In addition to this core business, Dell also sells peripherals such as printers, monitors and PDA's. Need an MP3 player, widescreen television or digital camera and some software? Again, Dell Home has it. In the past six months I have personally bought a PDA, (Dell Axim x50) a case for my PDA, (Rhinoskin case for x50) a notebook computer, (Dell Inspiron 9300) a computer mouse, (Kensington Optical Wireless Pro PocketMouse), and finally a new digital camera (Canon SD400) from Dell Home.
In all of the above cases I have either received the items as part of a bundle for free or at a deeply discounted price due to online coupons that reduce the price paid. In the case of the Canon SD400 which I haven't reviewed as of yet, the price I paid (including shipping and handling) was over $130 off the original price, and by far the best price I could find anywhere else! As a side note, if you wish to be alerted to coupons for the Dell site, sign up with the RSS feed from DealCatcher.com. There are several RSS aggregators available, many of which will route the feeds directly into an Outlook folder. I was using NewsGator until recently but now I use the free RSS Popper.
Finding products on Dell Home is a fairly easy ordeal. If you know exactly what you are looking for, enter the terms into the handy search bar. The Dell Home site will bring up a page with either the single product you are looking for or several products that meet the search criteria. If you want to narrow down your choices from a broad category, simply choose from among the main items such as Desktop PC's, Notebook PC's, Printers, Monitors and Televisions. From the resulting page you can narrow down your search to find a product that fits your needs exactly.
Once you have narrowed down your choices to a single product or multiple products, you can use the product details to determine which one is right for you. If you are purchasing a Desktop or Notebook PC, you will be able to either choose from preconfigured systems or configure your own system from a set of options. One strange thing about this is that the options are different depending on whether you are at the Home site, Small Business site or Large Business site. For instance, with the Inspiron 9300 I purchased, the processor options were different on the Home and Small Business sites. Dell Home will also try to suggest several accessories for your purchase. Unlike the accessories made available by other sites such as Amazon, the accessories actually make sense with the item you are purchasing. Any of them look good to you and at a good price? Add them to your cart as well and head for checkout…
Checkout and order completion is simple and safe, and Dell Home accepts Discover, MasterCard, Visa, American Express, and Dell Preferred Account. While the first four are fairly self-explanatory, the Dell Preferred Account is proprietary to the Dell site.
A Dell Preferred Account is a revolving line of credit which can be used to buy your purchases online. I signed up for a DPA and bought the Inspiron 9300 with a one-year no interest special. So long as I pay off the notebook prior to January of 2006 I will pay no interest on the original purchase price. With the SD400 I recently purchased, I was given no interest until 2007 along with an additional 2% off the purchase price due to buying with the Dell Preferred Account. The DPA has been in the news lately, as Dell currently resells the accounts to a third-party company that administers the paperwork, collections, etc. Dell is contemplating taking over the DPA's through Dell Financial Services, as the interest earned off of the accounts is an attractive income source and they already have the people to administer them.
Shipping options on Dell Home are not robust and vary widely in price depending on what you are purchasing. The customer has the option to choose from 3-5 day delivery, 2nd Business day delivery or Next Business day delivery. Please do not write a review of Dell or any other site claiming that you ordered your product on Monday and it didn’t show up on Tuesday, and therefore the first business day shipping was a big hoax! The shipping time is dependent on manufacture of the product, and therefore if you order a special configuration it will not be ready to ship the next day. In the case of my Inspiron, I did receive it within the allotted time but it was in production for two days before shipping. In all cases I have used the standard delivery option as it has been free for each order so far. Go for second business day or first business day and you are bound to pay more.
In all cases I have received an order confirmation email right away and shipment confirmation email upon shipment. Between these two emails you can track your order on the site, ranging from order placement, in production, boxed, and ready to be shipped. Once the order is shipped you will be provided with a tracking number for the shipment method chosen (I have received packages via both UPS and DHL) that you can check online for instant updates. The orders I have received have been on-time, packaged well and complete. There isn't much more to say…
Overall, Dell Home has supplied me with a notebook, PDA, digital camera and several peripherals. Being a discerning computer techie, it is saying something that Dell has secured my business. I personally have nothing bad to say at all about Dell Home and would encourage you to use the site for your personal computing needs as well.
Recommended:
Yes
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Notebook, Camera, PDA, etc.
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