Business-Supply

Full review
Pros: decent selection, good prices, no sales tax in Illinois, free shipping over $50.

Cons: limited selection

Earlier this week, I was looking for some rolling files to use in my studio for various music books. I found an item I wanted, the Rubbermaid 42686, and set out to find the best price using Dealtime.com. The unit was a penny more from this vendor, but it had lots of user reviews and an overall rating of 4.5 stars. I decided to check out the store.

The web site itself was very fast and I had no trouble ordering from the site. The store has a number of very customer-friendly practices, including

*same-day shipping if the order is received by 2pm EST
*95% of orders are received within 1 or 2 business days of shipping.
*shipping is free in the lower 48 states if the order is $50 or more.

I bought two of the items for an order total of about $56. They certainly achieved those promises. I ordered Monday afternoon after the deadline. The item shipped on Tuesday, although I did not know until the site updated after Midnight. The items arrived on Wednesday although, curiously enough the two boxes were separated by UPS. One arrived 4 hours after the other but still on time.

The site itself was very fast. Setting up my account was as easy as anywhere else. Checkout was fast as well and through their reported secure server. I received an email receipt right away and another receipt with a tracking link when it reported the shipment. There are tracking links available on the site as well, although an order will not appear until the nightly post on the day it ships.

I called on Tuesday to see if it had shipped yet, around 7:30 EST. The site said that customer service was open until 8, but all I could get was voice mail everywhere. I suspect they close earlier.

After the order, I surfed the site to see what they have. Their goal is to provide supply items to the small business and/or home office. They do have a number of fairly broad product lines, including:

Home
Office
Technology
Furniture
Ink & Toner
Printing (a service line for business cards, stamps and letterhead)

But within those product lines, the selections are narrow. For example, they do not have toner for my printer, the Canon Pixma IP4200. They do not have any PCs at all, but they do have a small selection of peripherals including printers, scanners, hard drives, etc. Among office supplies, selection is limited but they do have enough to support a home office between writing instruments, paper and supplies. Within furniture, there are file cabinets, computer desks, stacking, folding and ergonomic chairs and more.

Without having the printer cartridge I need, I didn’t really see a lot here that was going to meet known future needs. However, the store’s inventory is included in the dealtime searches, so I will price items there, and gladly buy from business-supply.com in the future if they have something I want.

Thanks for reading. God bless!

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