Buying a bicycle online
I am a devoted Amazon customer and probably purchase 3/4 of my yearly purchases thru them. I find the price comparable and find the convience and customer service to be 5/5. Most of the items are sold and distributed from Amazon itself. A few items like this bike are sold thru 3rd party sells like Sports by Sager. This is the first time ever I have had a problem with a 3rd party seller not being reasonable, and from what the Amazon rep told me, “Sports by Sager” will probably lose their Amazon Storefront because of this incident. This brings to a bigger question though about buying bikes online. I have purchased 5 bikes online in my life and this Dahon Curl i8 is the only one that was a total disaster and now its clear why. I have purchased 3 bikes online from BikeFriday.Com who builds custom foldable bikes similar to the Dahon BUT its completely custom and its built in USA, included the welding of the frame. All the bike I have purchased from BikeFriday have given decades of service without needing a single wheel truing. The other two bikes I have purchased online were two titanium bikes from BikesDirect.com who builds bikes in Asia and imports to USA. These bikes also have given me decades of trouble free use. The difference between BikesDirect.com and Dahon is that bikesdirect.com is ONLY direct to consumer so they know that to stay in business, their bikes need to be flawless out of the box. Dahon on the other hand is primarily sold thru bike shops so they know they can be sloppy with quality and the bike shops will have to deal with it. Gary Snellenberger kept coming back to the fact that I didnt take the bike into a bike shop to fix the front wheel and my point is that if a bike is shipped with such poor quality that the front wheel falls apart after 3 rides, what other problems have been swept under the carpet? The moral is clear, if you want to purchase bikes online then do so with a company that specializes in that. Buy an amazing custom bike at BikeFriday.com. By a top quality titanium bike at bikesdirect.com for 1/4 what you would pay at the local bike shop but for anything else, BUY AT YOUR LOCAL BIKE SHOP!