Have you ever bought a phone from Simply Electronics?

After my post yesterday about my wife selecting an Android phone, I decided to have a look at the most efficient way of buying an HTC One M8 online. I checked out Google Shopping to see what the cheapest rate was with them. I never tend to have a brilliant experience with Google Shopping but it’s usually semi helpful to at least get the rough market price.

The absolute cheapest I could find was from a company called Simply Electronics. Their price was £378.95 including free delivery.

This is a substantial discount on the HTC website (£549 — fulfilled via Expansys, who interestingly, will charge you just £469 from their own website). Amazon lists the HTC One M8 at a reasonably competitive £519. Very.co.uk, my personal choice for consumer buying hardware thanks to their ‘take 3’ buy-now-pay-later service offering, lists the M8 at a rather disappointing £579.

Back, then, to Simply Electronics. How can they possibly be retailing a phone at £141 cheaper than 800lb Gorilla, Amazon? Indeed the Simply Electronics price is actually cheaper than a factory reconditioned device for sale on Amazon at £389!

I looked around for some weasel words on the Simply Electronics website, wondering if I’d added a refurbished device to my shopping basked. Apparently not.

I then did some cursory research and ended up on this MoneySavingExpert thread filled with lots of commentary. Some posters (dating back from 2012) reckon the company is based in Hong Kong. I can only presume that this the HTC they’d be sending would be a Hong Kong, Chinese or similar derivative probably without a standard UK plug and so on.

Who knows?

Quite a lot of posters said that they did eventually receive their products but only after long delays (i.e. 10 or 11 days). That’s not actually too long. Just, in today’s next-day (or, same day!) world that I’m used to with the likes of Amazon or Very, that’s almost a lifetime.

Still. £141 saved compared to Amazon if you apparently wait for an unspecified amount of time and are happy to opt for a (presumed) non-UK spec device.

My preference — nay, my requirement — is a UK device for testing and evaluation. If you’ve used Simply Electronics I’d welcome your perspective. Would you recommend them to the Mobile Industry Review audience?

Right now I’m probably going to give the business to Expansys.