Everyone wants a deal, but there is a deal and then there is buying cheap junk. The difference is that the junky item has a low price but has quality so low that it winds up costing you more than if you had just bought something nicer to start with. I love a deal, I hate getting cheap garbage, so how do we find out which is which?
The best way I know how to explain it is with an example. I just happen to have an excellent example because my nephew Chris recently bought a telescope that absolutely falls into the cheap category. He thought he found a deal, and that deal now sits on a shelf in the garage two months after he received it right next to his dreams of being an astronomer.
Case study: Gskyer telescopes
I would be willing to bet Chris did what we all would have done. He figured out what he could afford, went on to Amazon and found the telescope in that price range that had a large number of reviews, and then sorted that by the one with the best reviews. He then smashed that Buy Now button and waited for his prize to arrive.
The name
We all are a sucker for a good name brand. Even if you buy the store-brand corn flakes, that is a brand you know. Would you buy “Third World Corn Fakes?” How about “Mostly Edible Corn Flakes?” Or my favorite, “Not Totally Toxic Corn Flakes?” Probably not. We want a brand and name we think we can trust, even if it is the brand of the store we are currently shopping in.
Gskyer telescopes, like most of these types of businesses, know this. They count on it. That is why this Chinese company purchased the rights to the name for a German optics company. They didn’t purchase the plant, the employees, the patents, nooooooo, they just wanted the name. A name they could use to get the consumer to part with their money.
A great example is a once prestigious company Bell and Howell founded in 1907. Their name is now used to sell “tac lights”, “tac visors”, and the “tac shaver” on late-night TV. I mean really, a cordless shaver is tactical because some kid claiming to be a Navy Seal jumps in a pool and shaves with it underwater. Yes, very prestigious name. LOL!
The review
We trust the metrics; reviews quality and quantity. Why shouldn’t we? I mean those are people who bought the telescope and liked it, right?
Maybe.
You see, you do not actually have to purchase an item on Amazon to leave a review for it. You also don’t have to have much in the way of information to create an Amazon account, just an email address to get started and I can get thousands of those from outlook.com, yahoo.com, and gmail.com with little effort.
Think of this… Let’s say that hypothetically you worked for Gskyer telescopes and you wanted to get people to buy your products. You know that products on Amazon with lots of four and five-star reviews sell tons of products, but how do you get those reviews if you haven’t sold any of your Gskyer telescopes?
What if you created an Amazon account with a free email address and left a five-star review for every one of your Gskyer telescopes, and what if you created twenty more email addresses, twenty more Amazon accounts, and did the same thing? Before long, you would have tons of great glowing reviews for those Gskyer telescopes. Then they would fly off the shelves because everyone would think they are great!
Surely Amazon looks for that kind of stuff and filters them out, right? Well, they try. The problem here is that when you are dealing with products made in certain countries (*cough* China *cough*) the cost of labor is so cheap you can hire a hundred people to all do that same thing. Then other companies figure out what you are doing and do the same thing. Before long, you have a hundred thousand people posting fake reviews every day. How can Amazon, or anyone, keep up with that volume?
So how do you know? I use FakeSpot.com. You simply go to www.fakespot.com/analyzer and paste in the URL to the Amazon page for the product you want to check out. The service will then check the reviews and give you a report. In this case, the review grade was a D and they say that approximately over SIX THOUSAND reviews have been removed or altered by Amazon for this product. Way to go Gskyer telescopes!
The specifications
What would a product be without specifications that make you want to buy buy buy? Gskyer telescopes know this too! That is why when you look at the ads on Amazon you see phrases like these:
- German Technology
- Ultra-clear
- Optimum Magnification
- Reliable and Friendly Customer Service (we will come back to this in a moment)
None of this really means anything. It is all just marketing designed to sell you cheap, sub-par, overpriced Gskyer telescopes, nothing more.
They tell you things like a maximum magnification of 120 so you use that to compare to another telescope which only has an advertised maximum magnification of 110, so you naturally buy the one with the most magnification. They do not tell you that those are theoretical maximums based on a mathematical calculation based solely on the size of the lens at the front of the telescope. A telescope with a scratched-up, halfway painted, semi-melted 80mm piece of plastic on the front has a higher maximum magnification than a real German optical work of art in the finest glass, meticulously crafted and engineered to the tightest tolerances and coated with the highest-end optical coatings but is only 70mm in diameter.
That makes sense, right?
Gskyer telescopes also don’t bother to tell you that magnification is not the ultimate benchmark for a telescope and that you should consider things like contrast, sharpness, light-gathering ability, control of reflections, etc. They don’t tell you because they don’t have any of that other stuff!
Documentation and customer service
A few minutes ago I said we would come back to “Reliable and Friendly Customer Service”, and here we are. This statement is not just a marketing embellishment by Gskyer telescopes, it is an outright fib.
Read the questions and reviews for the Gskyer telescopes and you will quickly learn that probably half of the customers want some kind of help putting together or using their telescope. I am not talking about one or two people here, I am talking about hundreds if not thousands. Remember these are sold to beginners, people with no experience, and you are selling them telescopes with nothing more than a single sheet of paper showing them how to put parts together like an Ikea dresser. We all know what to do with a dresser we put together, but maybe not an equatorial telescope mount.
It is so bad that people have been putting together entire Gskyer telescope manual websites like GskyerTelescopes.net. This guy is an amateur astronomer who has written a bunch of books and evidently has been so inundated with requests for help he created an entire website to help the poor saps who bought these Gskyer telescopes. Good on him, but how sad is that?
I went looking for help for Gskyer telescopes from the manufacturer. Their website at gskyer.com is pretty much a simple set of ads for their telescopes, many of which I could not actually find for sale online in any place that was in English. No help, no forums, no documents, nothing. I did find a page of contact information that has their address, phone number, and email address that isn’t even their domain.
So what do I mean that Gskyer telescopes email wasn’t even their domain? I mean I expected to find support@gskyer.com, service@gskyer.com, or even sales@gskyer.com. What I found was that the email address for Gskyer telescopes was gskyer@163.com which after a little looking I found was a free Chinese email website. Their ONLY email is a FREE EMAIL ADDRESS! Oh wow!
The end
So what does all this mean? Well, it meant for Chris that he shouldn’t have bought anything from Gskyer Telescopes! I didn’t tell him that, I just bought him a nice Celestron and we moved on. Chris is thrilled, the Gskyer will be in the next garage sale, and we all live happily ever after.
For you, it means you should do more than rely on reviews and marketing buzzwords to get a deal. Put a little effort into it and you really can get a pretty good deal without getting bit by cheap garbage. Oh, and don’t buy anything from Gskyer telescopes 😉