Internet scooters?

One of the interesting things about the scooter industry is the ease at which you can buy a scooter from an internet site or from ebay. While this opens up way too many issues to discuss here, I wanted to go over some of my experiences with trying to decide where to buy and what scooter to buy.

The phrase, 'You get what you pay for' is pretty true in just about anything, scooters included. However, many people are buying scooters for very low prices and having very good luck with them. You can also find people that spent top dollar for a Vespa or other high end scooter and are having problems with them. If you have a bit of mechanical aptitude and don't mind doing some work on them, the cheap scooters can be a good deal.

When I decided to look for a scooter, my biggest concern was price. I've always felt that buying something slightly above the middle of the pack was best for reliability and price. For example, computers. Noone needs a top of the line computer that costs four thousand dollars. A computer in the one thousand dollar range does everything the more expensive model can do and the differences in performance will be minimal.

So, the thousand dollar scooters were looking appealing to me. If I could find one that was solid, with a solid company behind it, I was prepared to go ahead and buy it. So, I started looking into online scooter companies. And quickly got completely overwhelmed at all the choices. Especially since all of the choices looked exactly the same but with wildly varying prices.

On the scootdawg forums (link to the left), I got a reply to one of my posts to check out Vince at Moto-Fino Scooters ( http://www.ecobikeusa.com/ ) so I sent him an email asking some questions and also sent an email to another company that had insanely low prices but high ebay feedback.

Vince called me back the next day. We talked for at least 20 minutes. He didn't make insane promises, he simply said his bikes were pretty good and he stood behind them. There was a question about how much shipping would be to my home and he called back the next day with that info. To be honest, I was really trying to decide whether to buy from him or spend 35% more at my local shop. There were pros and cons to both decisions.

Luckily for me, the Piaggio was in the paper that afternoon so my decision was made.

I guess what little advice I can give is that if going the internet route is your decision, make sure you speak to someone and ask as many questions you can.

Oh, by the way, it was on May 28th when I emailed Vince and that other company. Remember Vince called me the next day, answered all my questions, didn't hard sell his scooters and called the next day trying to save me a few dollars with shipping. The other company finally emailed a response on June 8th, answered one of the five questions I asked and in my opinion, gave me a bogus answer at that.