WatchBrokers.com

This is a site review, not a service review, since I've never sent this business a luxury watch and if I had a luxury watch I probably wouldn't send it.

Why not? Aside from the legion of complaints about the service here? Well this is how I approach it. First off, you've got a watch which may have a market value of $5000, on average, but could be as low as $1000 or as high as $50,000.

Firstly, ask yourself whether you already know how much it's worth - in other words you have a contemporary written valuation from a recognized source. If so, you'll be looking at this site and considering whether it looks like the sort of place you want to send an extremely valuable item. I'll come back to that.

If you don't know, then you're going to want to know, and you're going to want to know a realistic, achievable market price that's been established by a trusted valuer. And that's probably your first consideration and the reason you arrived at the site. And I'll come back to that, too.

But let's go back a step. What are you doing with a watch worth thousands of dollars in the first place, and why do you want to sell it? If it's yours, then presumably you purchased it from a proper dealer, you know where to get it valued and you either know some of the places to advertize it or place it for sale, internationally, or you can afford to find out. Possibly, you belong to one of the many owners' groups or collectors groups that are occupied with high value luxury watches, and discuss them and trade them. If you don't, they aren't hard to find. Again, as an owner, you may know about them anyway.

Alternatively, it's an unwanted gift, or an heirloom, or you're selling it on behalf of the family or some elderly relative who now needs the money. In other words, you probably know nothing or next to nothing about luxury watches, where to value them and where to place them for sale.

OK. So let's look at this site from the view of an owner of a valuable luxury watch. Does it look like a professional, established business with hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock and thousands of customers? In which case, does it really need the dopey blonde on the front page (I think the idea is meant to be "sultry" but I prefer dopey myself)? And how about that jumble of bad images of watches, that have obviously been cut and pasted from other pages and then badly photoshopped together? With all that quality stock, could they not manage a professional photo of a few genuine watches all together in the one place, or at least in the same dimension? Now I hope I'm not slipping into establishing authenticity based on design quality - I've seen way, way too many cleverly designed sites that have nothing but cheap fraudsters hiding behind them. But in this case, as we're talking not just a mega-thousands of dollars business but "the world's largest watch broker", they couldn't try to look the part? Bad business practice, at the least, since looking cheap suggests no business.

And how about that "world's largest broker" bit? What does that mean? They have a big office? A big company? No, come to think of it the correct word there would be "brokerage" I believe. Anyway, how does one judge what "large" means, unless you use a much clearer term, such as "largest marketplace" or "most trade" or something that has some substance to it?

Just for comparison, and not because I have any experience of either site but just as a design matter, compare this site with another:

http://www.chrono24.com/en/home/index.htm

Now this one, Chrono 24, states that it's "the largest online luxury watch market". Now come on guys, there can be only one, you know. Who do we believe, here, if anyone?

So, back to watchbrokers.com, which has a vague slogan, a dumb blonde, and some cheap watch images that may or may not even have been photos, once. The big exciting thing, though, is on the top right of the page, where you can enter your watch details and get a "free appraisal". Well look. They can't appraise your watch because they can't see it. And even they have to admit, unless they can get their hands on the piece, they can't tell you much at all. A minor difference could be worth hundreds, maybe thousands. So let's ignore that bit, but we can still play with the form and enter the details of our watch as best we can. Not that it matters, because I can tell you now, to save you the trouble, that they have 993 buyers for a Rolex, regardless of whether it's the rarest vintage Rolex ever or the most commonplace modern one. Or even a rare and exclusive modern one. Same buyers for every model. Likely? Nope. As a second test, you can try entering "not sure" for every detail except the make. How many buyers? Yes, you guessed.

Still, let's pass on to the post-click page and see what happens next. A new page brings a new bit of terrible photoshopping, with an obviously faked up background, over which there's a stock image of eight happy call center people in front of their bank of monitors, and then the extra smiley call center girl with the partially unbuttoned blouse and bedroom eyes who's been flown in from an entirely different stock photo and pasted on top. It's a bit of a train wreck for a business claiming to be the biggest of its type in the world.

Next stage is to enter your name, phone number and email address, and then you're taken to a page which shows you a representative's name, phone number and email address. And what happens next? No idea. We've reached the "stage 3, what happens next?" page, and nothing happened.

In my case I got Kelvin McQuilkin, in Atlanta, who appears to be this guy:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/igniteinc
http://www.facebook.com/people/Kelvin-McQuilkin/*******123

Presumably you're going to get a phone call and/or email from someone, maybe the energetic Kelvin, who wants to talk to you about your "unsure what it is" Rolex, but they could have just given you that information at the start and had done with it. You're not being offered anything else here. No chance to get that tempting "free appraisal", no examples of similar watches selling elsewhere, no market details for the brand, not a thing. It's pretty much the equivalent of putting some old gold into an envelope and sending off in the mail, with no idea what you just gave away and the hope that you'll get more than a couple of dollars for it.

Going a bit deeper - which obviously, you ought to do if you're messing about with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of luxury watches - the terms of use do make it very clear that you will get, at best, a telephone quote from the company. Nothing in writing, ever, and no certified valuations. Their valuation, which is only what some unseen person thinks it's worth, you can take or leave. If you leave it, though, it'll cost you to get the watch back because they're going to charge you for the return shipping and insurance. This is pretty paltry stuff for a business that's allegedly trading in hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods and could easily play nice just to maintain a solid reputation. The sense of the terms, to me at least, is that everything is down to you, and they're doing you a big favor.

Oh, and if it turns out that the watch you send them is counterfeit, they'll charge you at least an additional $200, to cover their legal defense for having fake goods on the premises. Or some such. But anyone who knows, will tell you that the best fakes are only identifiable by an expert in counterfeiting that particular brand and model, who has to have the piece right there, and be able to take the back off, too. Some fine Rolex fakes are so good that even then, it can be a challenge to verify the mechanism is genuine. It's always possible, but certainly you aren't going to be able to do it. And possibly, your local watch store or jeweler could make a mistake.

Also in the terms of use, just by using the site you're accepting that some unknown person, who has no known credentials as a valuer, is going to tell you how much he thinks your watch is worth. On the phone. And on the strength of this, you're going to let him sell it to one of the 993 customers who is panting to get hold of it right now.

I'm just saying, that's how all this reads to me, and if it is what it seems, then perhaps that's all that it is. Cheap corner cutting doesn't befit a business claiming to be as big and important as this, and if it were me I wouldn't start off by laying down a few pages of weasel terms and cop-out conditions to a potential customer with a $30,000 timepiece and an interest in doing business with me.

The design and implications of this one suggest, to me anyway, that it's aimed at people who probably don't know what they've got and aren't the original owners, and probably have little or no idea what it's worth or how or where to sell it. The sort of people who send off their gold engagement rings in brown envelopes to companies they've seen advertising on TV, in fact. My money is on the smart money going elsewhere.