Amex Gold (and Platinum, but not Green) has a program called “Best Value Guarantee“. Under this program, they will guarantee you the lowest price on most any item that you purchase using their card, up to $250 per item or $1000 per year. You do not have to sign up; it comes as a service to all card members.

For most purchases, if you’re a saavy buyer (and I assume that you are if you’re reading my blog), this might not be worth the trouble. However, with electronics in general, and photography equipment in particular, this can easily be used to save you hundreds of dollars.

For example, a friend recently came to me for advice on buying a camcorder. She had picked out the Sony DCR-PC350Sony DCR-PC350 and had used froogle to compare prices, and wanted to know if I thought that she should go ahead and make an order from the low cost provider, someone she hadn’t heard of before. Usually she’ld buy from a store she knew, but was intrigued by the close to $300 difference in price.

First, I pointed her to Reseller Ratings, one of my favorite websites that has saved me from making a mistake countless times (when greed dominates over common sense). In this particular case the vendor has a 0.63 rating (on a 0 to 10 scale, with the “average” vendor at 7.22) with 47 pages of almost 100% negative customer feedback!!! My suggestion for her was to buy the item at B&H (or her local electronics store) with her American Express Gold Card. She should then pick up a photography magazine (Popular Photography, Photographic, etc), the ones with 30+ pages of camera ad’s in the back. Find an ad from a sleazy photo store (Most besides B&H and Adorama are). Call American Express Best Value Guarantee at 800-557-8317, and submit a claim for the lower price. (You’ll have to send them a copy of the ad). A few weeks later they’ll send you a check, it’s that simple.

As I said before, for most purchases this probably isn’t worth the effort. But with camera gear, there are so many “bait and switch” ad’s that are trivial to find, that it’s very easy to find HUGE price discrepencies to take advantage of. If you buy one or two electronic or photo items per year, this alone would pay for the increase in fee to upgrade to a Gold Card. One final bit of advice: All this information is current as of March 2005. If you do follow my suggestion on this, please check with American Express first, to see if there have been any material changes to this program.

- The Goose