What Tech Support Problems Do People Have?

As part of our continuing effort to make ProductCritic the most useful site on the Internet for helping you decide if you should buy a certain digital camera, camcorder, or cell phone, we've worked with FixYa to be one of the first sites to support their widget.

If you don't know what FixYa is, they had recently been written up on Lifehacker. In short, FixYa is a database of user-submitted instructions for fixing tech support issues for various products. They have a pretty good database so far and are continually adding more support answers.

We've started adding the widget to every new product that we enter into ProductCritic and will, over the next little while, add the widget to all the existing products that are on ProductCritic. We've already added them to the Top 10 Rated Digital Cameras. I've included a pic of what the widget looks like and you can see it on ProductCritic's page of Apple iPhone reviews.

I like the widget as it adds another level of information for people who are trying to decide whether to purchase a particular product. It provides a quick glimpse at what problems people may be having with a product despite the reviews or scores that professional reviewers are giving.

We will continue to make ProductCritic as helpful as possible a tool so that when you do finally make a purchase of a camera, camcorder, or cell phone, you have the greatest chance of being happy with your purchase.

If you'd like to see a feature on ProductCritic that would help you in making the right purchase decision for you, let us know!

Don't Get Scammed By Online Camera Stores

We've posted about being scammed by online camera stores in the past but yesterday we received an e-mail from a visitor of our digital camera reviews warning us about an experience with one of the worst online camera "stores", bestpricecameras.com.

I just wanted to warn your readers of a "supplier" of digital cameras that I regard to to be highly suspect: bestpricecameras.com
I found that they had the best price advertised anywhere for a new Canon Rebel xti 400d and for the lens, a 17 to 40mm L. All for around $960+/-. Sounds too good to be true? That's because it is. Please post this on your website so that others do not suffer the strange tactics of this company. I cannot imagine what they hope to obtain from their methods.

I ordered the camera and lens (which I suspect will be of outstanding quality). After waiting a couple of weeks, I called them and they said it was on back order and that I should receive it within a week. After 2 more weeks, I called them again and got some surly jerk who mumbled something about "Chinese" or something and hung up on me. I called back and finally got a salesperson who was honest enough to tell me that they did not even have a distributor for the camera. Why were they selling something they could not even supply? Don't know.

Maybe they hoped people would just let their order ride and forget about it? I didn't. At least they had not run my card so I cancelled the order, bit the bullet and paid the extra 30% and ordered it through Amazon.com, and got it a week later. Forget thinking that high-class equipment will come to you for cheap prices; it ain't gonna happen, and something bad may result. Go with a responsible business that is known and trusted. For me, that's Amazon. Oh yeah, Bestpricecameras.com can kiss my grits.

Please, please, please keep in mind the old adage, "if it's looks too good to be true, it probably is". These scammers prey on people who really, really want the camera but don't want to pay the price. If everyone else is selling the camera at about the same price but you suddenly find it for $200 cheaper, don't let your desire for a good deal overcome your common sense. Some online store in Brooklyn will NOT have it $200 cheaper than Amazon.

At ProductCritic's main site, we are constantly looking at the individual ads being shown in our Google Ads box. We block out any ads from stores that have a history of scamming people so that they never show up on ProductCritic. If you run a site, you should do the same and do your part in helping to curb the scamming of innocent people, and more importantly, the visitors to your site.

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Your Rank In Search Results...How To Compare Against Competitors

Since launching ProductCritic last month, I've learned a lot from other bloggers about various terms and tools that you should use to optimize, improve, and gather information about your site or blog.

What is SERP? It stands for Search Engine Results Pages. SERP tools help you gather information on where your site ranks on the search engines for various search terms. My favorite SERP tool is Shoemoney's Serps Script. It's really free, fast, has nothing extraneous, and works great for comparing where ProductCritic ranks against its competitors. I also use it to compare the rankings for ProducCritic against one of the largest technology review sites on the Internet....CNET.

Not surprisingly, for a site that only launched a month ago, ProductCritic doesn't rank at all for the generic and most popular keyword searches like "digital camera review". What is surprising to me is that some of the "long tail" terms (I'll post a blog entry on short tails, long tails, and hittail next week) rank incredibly well for ProductCritic and we actually beat CNET for those terms!

For example, using Shoemoney's SERP tool, I found that for the search term "vpc-hd1a review" (one of the camcorders on the site), ProductCritic ranked #4 on Google and #8 on MSN while CNET, for the same search term, ranked #9 on Google and #22 on MSN. Disappointingly, for the same search term, ProductCritic doesn't even rank on Yahoo! but CNET is ranked #1 on there. Nevertheless, I'm greatly encouraged that, for some terms, a new site like ProductCritic can rank higher than a site like CNET for the same relevance of content.

Even more encouraging for me is that the same searches for ProductCritic competitors (like wize.com) show up at #41 on Google and don't even rank on MSN (some didn't rank on any search sites). We obviously still have lots of work to do for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but Shoemoney's SERP tool helps us quickly compare ourselves against other sites and gauge our progress as the months go by.

Shoemoney is one of the most successful Google Adsense publishers on the net with hundreds of sites and thousands of domain names. Providing something like his SERPs tool is impressive to me as he provides it for free and it helps many other bloggers and site owners using his success as inspiration to continue to work hard.

Is This The Best New Way To Promote A Site?

This blog exists to promote our main site, ProductCritic. We're quite open about this and the name of this blog should be clue enough.

As I've written about previousely, we use a variety of strategies to promote the growth of ProductCritic. I've just started to use another method that I'm hoping will help gain some backlinks from the second most popular search engine...Yahoo!

How do you do this? Use Yahoo! Answers. I've started reading some of the questions in the Consumer Electronics category (specifically Cameras, Camcorders, and Cell Phones). There appear to be quite a lot of questions in the form of "Which of these digital cameras is the best?" and "Is the Nikon D40 better than the Canon 20D?"

I provide honest answers to questions that I know something about and provide a link to the relevant products on ProductCritic and their ProductCritic Scores. I believe this can genuinely help people answer their questions while at the same time providing a plug for ProductCritic. I'll know that this isn't just a tactic to merely troll for links when one of the people asking a question picks my answer as the best one that answered their question.

Best of all, this should help raise the profile of ProductCritic since Yahoo will crawl their own site, right?

What do people think of this method? Leave a comment!

Official Launch of ProductCritic.com!

We've sent out the announcement to people who signed up on the site and have officially launched ProductCritic.com.

Need an easy way to determine whether a specific Digital Camera, Camcorder, or Cell Phone is worth it? ProductCritic is a free site that gives you one location to find professional reviews of a particular product. The site also calculates a score of all the reviews and summarizes them to come up with the ProductCritic Score for each product.

If you are currently evaluating a few brands or models and trying to make a decision about which Digital Camera, Camcorder, or Cell Phone to purchase, you will immediately benefit from ProductCritic. You only need to compare the ProductCritic Scores to get a good idea if professional reviewers generally rate one product better than another.

Finally, all the expert reviews of a product are linked from the site so you no longer need to go searching the Internet for all the reviews. You'll be confident that you haven't missed any reviews which could help you make the right decision.

We think you'll find the site as useful as we do.

Sneaky Camera Marketing Tactics

Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com) is one of the most trusted camera information and review sites on the Internet (to me, they share the top spots with Steve's Digicams and Digital Camera Resource Page). They have a short post up titled "Stop misleading 'Image Stabilization' labels".

The post describes the tactics some companies take in labeling their cameras as having a "Image Stabilization" or "Anti-shake" feature when in fact, there is no actual physical anti-shake mechanism. Instead, these cameras perform their "image stabilization" by turning up the ISO for some shots. This allows you to take pictures in low-light and therefore, reduce the blurriness but the quality of the image goes way down.

I always wondered about this. I have a Canon 20D with an actual Image Stabilization lens and there are still many instances where it's hard to take a non-flash picture without the blur. The dpreview.com post backs up my suspicions when I see commercials where people are bouncing around the place taking razor-sharp pictures in a nightclub with a point & shoot camera.

Don't believe the hype.