Bigalley reviews

Prompt shipping and the book is in excellent condition.

This is a very unprofessional website and not customer-centered. I bought a book on the site for $19.00 and the seller did not mailed the book that I paid for. Instead I was mailed a book that was worth $2.00 NEW. The seller herself was very unprofessional and rude, denying everything. She finally accepted the return, I mailed the book back to her and never received my money back. I also sold a different book and was never received the payment. I emailed my complaints to the website and all they sent me was automated messages. A person never even took the time to provide the service that I needed. This was my experience with this site and I absolutely do not recommend it to anybody.

A masterpiece of plagiarism.

Most of the text on this site has been lifted from other sites, mainly Ebay's half.com, but also from all over the web. This in itself is illegal of course, though not exactly uncommon, especially among the more dubious online traders. At least, it suggests a certain disrespect of data protection which might be a concern to you.

For example:

From the "about us" page:

"Bigalley.com, is the leading online textbook service. Our primary objective is to save students money. With over one million textbooks available, Bigalley.com ,is the best resource for buying and selling textbooks online."

and from another site:

"Chegg is the leading online textbook rental service. Our primary objective is to save students money. With over one million textbooks available, Chegg is the best resource for renting textbooks online."

From BigAlley, http://www.bigalley.com/buying_policy.pl:

"Although this policy may seem long, we have prepared a detailed policy because we believe you should know as much as possible about Bigalley.com's practices so that you can make informed decisions."

From half.com, http://pages.half.ebay.com/help/buyer/createacct_buy.html

"Although this policy may seem long, we have prepared a detailed policy because we believe you should know as much as possible about Half.com's practices so that you can make informed decisions."

As far as I can tell, the entire privacy policy is copied, too:

http://www.bigalley.com/privacy_policy.pl

is identical to

http://www.dealoz.com/privacy.pl?cat=default&lang=en-us

except the domain name has been changed where referenced.

From BigAlley, http://www.bigalley.com/transaction_policy.pl

"Used - Acceptable: Some damage to the cover but integrity still intact, binding slightly damaged but integrity still intact, possible writing in margins, possible underlining and highlighting of text, no missing pages (Item beaten up a bit but it works)"

From half.com: http://pages.half.ebay.com/help/popup/ratings.html

"Acceptable - Some damage to the cover but integrity still intact, binding slightly damaged but integrity still intact, possible writing in margins, possible underlining and highlighting of text, no missing pages (Item beaten up a bit but it works)"

The rest is likewise copied from Ebay.

The "Legal Notices" page is a standard text, to be found copied widely across the internet, by many websites. They aren't all cheeky enough to stick a copyright statement on the end, though ...

" 11. BigAlley may terminate this agreement at any time without notice for any reason. Users may terminate this agreement by destroying all materials obtained from this web site.
"COPYRIGHT 2010
All rights reserved. "

.. but some are:

"Mainstream Engineering Corporation may terminate this agreement at any time without notice for any reason. Users may terminate this agreement by destroying all materials obtained from the Mainstream Engineering Corporation site.
© 2009, Mainstream Engineering Corporation. All rights reserved."

Well I don't know whose copyright it is. Can't be both of them, though.

The product pages look rather like Amazon.com in part, which is not surprising since looking just a bit deeper, at least some of the underlying code has been 'borrowed' from there.

Oddly, the site has utilized a technique which prevents anything other than the homepage from being listed at Google, which is most unusual since normally the more pages listed, the better for the site.

The seller ID for all items is the same, with no feedback one way or the other despite having sold seven items. This in itself is odd enough, but the clincher is that there are only a handful of books for sale.

So what's going on here? My guess - one person trying to sell their books, and hoping that if they cobble together a cut-and-paste of a site, they might get people to send them more.

Not that this needs to be an issue, as long as the seller is honest and does send what you buy, or pays you for what you send. We can always overlook the copyright theft, if the deal on offer is a good one. I'm just making observations, you make your own judgments, and decide for yourself whether other reviews for this site are honest, or not. Knowledge is power :-)