Wait you have to have a Google account just to order a pixel phone? How dumb would you have to be to do that when you're doing shady reselling deals? But this is why I distrust any online transaction that cannot be done without a guest account unless there's some solid reason. There's no such reason for buying a phone.
In true google “organizing the world’s information”-fashion this page is not available in certain countries and you are not even informed that you have been blocked or that you tried to go somewhere “you shouldn’t”
This silent blocking makes me unreasonably angry.
Why is it a secret that google is selling a phone or a set of earbuds? Why can’t they acknowledge that it exists?
When I visit that link I am asked to log into my Google account.
If I open the link in private mode, I get redirected to a region picker, where Google reluctantly lets me choose US ("are you _sure_ you want to visit the US store?") From there I have to navigate to the new pixel phones, having completely lost where the link pointed.
I can't believe how difficult Google, a company that claims to have its mission to organize the worlds information, makes it to access their marketing webpages!
Because it looks like Google is using one merchant's carefully photographed image of a product for all the merchants selling that product. This seems a bit unfair.
crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup
If I use Google Shopping to search for something, all it does is redirect me to the actual retailer, there's no way to purchase from Google themselves. Retailers might pay for priority placement in the search listing, but that's the extent of Google's financial involvement in the transaction. It's not like I pay Google and they hide the details of the seller from me.
Google is likely outsourcing the operation of the store to 3rd parties. Makes sense, as it would probably be more trouble than it's worth for Google to sell the stuff themselves.
Yeah, so sort of a moot point on whether or not Google has their own retail stores - it shouldn't affected peoples abilities to see and feel real devices before they buy.
Didn't they get in trouble doing this with their amazon competitor? I remember for a while searching for things would give me options to buy them from google.
It also really needs to be mentioned that Google’s store was (is) absolutely awful for buying gear.
I wanted to buy 2 pixels from them. Put the order in, no news for 7 days, at the exact 7 day mark my order gets cancelled. Tried talking to customer support with no success because there isn’t any.
So I put the order in the second time and the exact same thing happens: after exactly 7 days, my order gets cancelled. I say f’ it and buy from a local dealer, with next day delivery.
A few days after the fact, I try using my credit card for something and my transaction gets denied (I had a -200 euros limit). I call the bank and they tell me that there’s a hold on my account from Google, for the price of both orders (about 1500 euros I think) and they are waiting for the funds so it can clear. My only two options is to talk to Google to cancel the charge (lol) or wait 30 days.
I simply closed my card and got a new one.
A few months later I started getting notifications that transactions on this card are being rejected - someone was trying to buy stuff for 1-3$ with my card but it was closed so they didn’t go through. Since I mostly use virtual cards for online stuff (which Google doesn’t like), and the physical card rarely, there is a really big chance that my credit card number got leaked from Google, but there is no way for me to prove that.
Google has a history of trying to block users who they don’t ship to, from viewing item details in their online stores.
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