100% agree with you, gadgetman.
I have bought a pair of Phonak M90s online from an established British business (that trades on eBay and has its own separate website) for $2600.I now have an all-in $150/year service agreement with my local audiologist which includes clinic visits, cleaning, consumables, REM and retuning. My home insurance covers loss and damage. The Phonaks have a year’s international warranty and 2 years UK warranty. But I have spent several evenings researching what I need in order to be more confident that I am making the right decision. This forum helped. A lot.
I think there are elements of buying online that make it a challenge if you are relatively inexperienced. Reading this thread would give people a heads up on what to look for but a lot of the same sense that one would use to buy any item over $1k can be employed here.
I see the process of hearing aid purchase as being classic unbundling. I don’t want a conversation with my audiologist about cost of hearing aids. I just want to talk about how I can make the most of my hearing and hardware. Very happy to pay separately for that advice. Experience tells me that a good audiologist/HA fitter can get so much more out of these devices.
For what its worth my tips for buying online, especially if importing:
- Does the selling platform (e.g. ebay) have a remedy if the purchase goes wrong? How confident do you feel about the business if it doesn’t have a reputation to maintain?
- Factor in the cost of an audiogram at some point. Some suppliers can program the aids before they send them. In other cases this is up to you to organize
- Factor in the cost of REM testing and re-tuning as either a service contract or per visit cost with a local audiologist.
- Check the warranty. Different manufacturers have different warranties in different regions.
- If you are importing from another country, check that you are not paying local sales taxes unnecessarily (That can happen automatically with eBay) and factor in import duty if relevant (in the US its 10%)
- When paying by credit card or PayPal. make sure you pay in the local currency, not your own. Your credit card company’s exchange rate may well be hundreds of dollars cheaper than that of PayPal.
I am sure there are more items in a comprehensive checklist. I offer these as a community gesture based on what I learned from the forum and my experiences. Hope this helps someone else.