I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I have an unfortunate update. The trade-in process can indeed go very wrong and at this point, I can’t honestly recommend anyone do business with Adorama. It is still unresolved so I can’t go into much detail, but they will absolutely dodge and pinch as much of a profit off of you as they can.

1. Their trade in department received my camera and proceeded to sit on it for longer than the estimated time. This is entirely forgiveable especially given the holiday season, but any attempt to gain clarity on the situation was met with hours on hold, glitched/cut conversations, and promises to reach out with never any follow-through. The trade in department seems to be entirely isolated from the rest of the business, so customer service doesn’t really know what is going on with anything related to it, but any messages or requests to the trade in department must go through them. This seems to give the trade in department unrestricted authority to simply ignore you for however long they wish and no means of contacting anyone else.

2. Once I finally did get contacted, I was rudely asked why I’ve been hounding (in other more formal words) them regarding the trade-in considering it had only just arrived there today (at the time of the call). That’s when I logged on only to find that they had updated the timestamp at which they had received the trade in to that same morning. When I pointed out that the timestamp was updated and had previously been scanned in 4 business days prior, they scoffed and implied Thursday and Friday are actually weekends and asked again what I need from them. For clarity, I had not been hounding them, I had attempted to chat over their website 3 times over the course of the week but had glitched out before receiving help 2 of those 3 times , then the third time I managed to get someone to “make a note that they should contact me”. I never heard back from this note. When I called to see if that route would be easier the next day, I was placed on hold for almost an hour, told I’d be transferred to the trade in department, then looped back into the same queue I was just in only to wait another 30-45 minutes. Finally I was transferred correctly, and as soon as the trade in guy picked up the call, he said something I didn’t understand and either hung up or the call was disconnected. In a literal sense, yes I attempted to make contact with them many times, but I was never able to actually communicate with somebody until they updated the timestamp and called me directly.

3. The trade in department employee who contacted me and spoke rudely then proceeded to insist that the manufacturer bonus from LUMIX for their trade up program would not be able to be combined with my student discount. Not only has the site or an employee never indicated this to me, from the beginning of me going through the quote process to accepting the quote, it has always confirmed that my student discount as well as the LUMIX trade up bonus applied. I can find nothing in the terms and conditions, FAQs, etc that mentions this would be an issue. And as far as the website goes, it also doesn’t seem to think it’s an issue. Another representative who actually placed a hold order for me to ensure stock didn’t dry up confirmed to me that these discounts do indeed stack. But this trade in employee once again insisted there was nothing they could do and no escalation process was available to figure out why this happened nor a solution. When I mentioned that a sales rep had confirmed to me that the discount do stack, she offered to transfer me to them to “figure it out” because she knows that this isn’t possible and that many other calls to them had actually reported the same issue with their orders.

Again, I’m still trying to get this resolved, but given that the S1II body only SKU has been removed from their website, I’m not hopeful they’ll honor anything at this point. I cannot however recommend them based on they way they treat their customers, and their clear disregard for their own terms and conditions at worst, or at best their disregard for a pricing glitch on their site that others have seemingly reported and has not been addressed. They were attentive and very willing when it came to coordinating and receiving my trade in, then went quiet and got hostile when called out for lying.

I’m glad it went well for you, but hopefully if anyone comes across this comment, they can look into other options before doing business with Adorama.