Great source for low-priced books, especially sheet music
Written: May 25 '06
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Pros: Nice prices on their stock, low shipping charges
Cons: They don’t offer free shipping on larger orders
For the last few weeks, I’ve been looking for a sheet music book published by Hal Leonard entitled “Hard Bop” and I wanted it fairly quickly. My usual alternatives weren’t real good. Sheetmusicplus.com had stock on it at list price of $14.95. I would have paid $3 to ship on top of it and waited a couple of weeks for standard shipping. Buy.com had it for $13.45, but was out of stock. Amazon had it at $10.17 but I would have had to order something else or paid shipping.
So, I went over to addall.com to see what other online vendors had it. Walmart.com had the lowest price at $10.34 plus $2.48 shipping. So, I checked out the web site in hopes of making an order.
First, I checked Ebates.com to see if a rebate was available. It wasn’t. Then I went over to the Walmart.com site. I was pleasantly surprised at the clean, organized site layout and the fast load time. I put the book title into the site index and it popped right up. One of the nice things about the site was that there was an estimated delivery time link available. I was also comforted by their return policy. The products at Walmart.com, with some limited exceptions, can be returned at any Walmart store. I also noticed that they had acceptable security and privacy policies.
I checked out the delivery promise and went ahead and made an order on May 16, with a promised delivery date of May 22 – 26. It ultimately arrived on May 24. The charge was what I described, plus $1.12 sales tax.
Entering the order was easy. I entered my name and address information and an account password to establish an account. Confirming the order was very quick.
They took overnight to process and reported shipping the following day. I received an email confirmation that included a link to track the package with the post office. It didn’t work all that well, because they shipped smart mail, which doesn’t show up on USPS tracking until just before it is delivered.
While I bought books, Walmart.com has a number of product categories, including Electronics, movies, music (cd AND downloads – check out my CD, The Power of Two by John Temmerman’s Jazz Obsession Quartet), books, toys jewelry, baby, sports and fitness, home, garden and patio, photo center, video games, apparel, gifts and flowers and pharmacy.
While they do have a cancel order link, my experience is that shipping is fairly inevitable once an order is accepted. I found another book I wanted available from them before business opened the following day and attempted unsuccessfully to cancel. The site reported sending the request but also reported that it might be too late to cancel it. So, when the first book shipped, I then ordered the second book.
On balance, I’m pleased. I got the book I wanted at a fair price in a fairly short amount of time considering that I chose standard shipping. Of course, Buy.com and Amazon.com can be competitive, particularly on orders above $25 where both ship for free on orders from their own stock. However, Walmart.com is a great, low-priced alternative to consider.
Thanks for reading. God bless!
Please check out my related reviews:
Ebates web portal
Don’t use Overstock.com
Circuitcity.com web store
CompuPlus Direct web store
Business-Supply.com web store
Musiciansbuy.com web store
Sheetmusicplus.com web store
Activemusician.com web store
Chase Perfectcard
Rebate credit card
Recommended:
Yes
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Hard Bop sheet music book
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