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Musition friend4/2/2023 ![]() ![]() Notable exceptions include large and heavy items, preowned gear, or international orders. Musician’s Friend provides free ground shipping for most items over $25. Sweetwater and Musician’s Friend both offer free shipping, but there are some differences in their policies, including qualifying items, and delivery times. ![]() Especially for big box retailers, the manufacturers are very strict about how they set prices, so you’re unlikely to see much of any variation between Sweetwater and Musician’s Friend. Pricing is an area in which both stores are working on an equal playing field. ![]() As they don’t have a team of guitar techs on staff, they are also unable to offer any kind of upgrade services, but instead, will recommend that you take your new guitar to one of the guitar techs at your local Guitar Center. Every new guitar they list, whether it’s $100 or $10,000 goes straight to the customer, factory sealed and uninspected. Musician’s Friend don’t have any such inspection to offer. You can ask for anything from a fret dress or action alteration, right through to a new nut or even upgraded pickups. In addition, when buying from Sweetwater, you can (for an extra fee) have them perform a setup to your specification. It’s an added layer of protection on top of the factory QA that Sweetwater customers really like. One of their guitar techs will look over everything on the instrument, and repack the guitar before shipping it to the customer. Part of Sweetwater’s appeal is their free 55 point inspection that every guitar over $299 gets prior to being shipped. What they do offer, however, is the Sweetwater Marketplace, an area of their site that operates much like Reverb, in which private sellers can list their used gear for sale. Sweetwater does have a small selection of used guitars for sale, but as they only have 1 physical location, they don’t receive a lot back in trade. Musician’s Friend has a larger offering, with a reported 85,000 items listed.ĭue to their relationship with Guitar Center, who take a significant number of used guitars in trade across the country, Musician’s Friend has access to that entire supply of pre-owned instruments. They do, however offer discounts on their demo models from their shop floor.īoth retailers offer large numbers of products for sale – Sweetwater claims to list 50,000 unique products for sale, with new items being added daily. Sweetwater do have sales and discounts, but they are less frequent, and in some cases difficult to find on their website. Musician’s Friend scores well in this area, with frequent, and often significant special offers and sales throughout the year, including their daily “ Stupid Deal of the Day”, a random daily offer in which they heavily discount 1 select item. Their overall Trustpilot grade is poor, with a rating of “Bad”, which obviously doesn’t reflect well. Musician’s Friend, on the other hand, aren’t particularly renowned for their customer service. They maintain fantastic scores on trusted review sites like Trustpilot, and operate with fairness and transparency. Looking after customers is a core point of the business model at Sweetwater, with a dedicated “Sales Engineer” being assigned to every patron. ![]() The points once again go to Sweetwater when it comes to customer service. Performance aside, Sweetwater also take more time to provide images of individual guitars, so customers can choose their exact instrument, making it as close as you can get to visiting a physical store to choose an instrument. Not only was it easier to use, but in a speed test on, the Sweetwater site also far outperformed Musician’s Friend, with their homepage fully loaded and interactive in 3.0 seconds, vs 6.3 seconds TTI (time to interactive) with Musician’s Friend. In direct comparison, we find that the Sweetwater website is much more straight forward to navigate than that of Musician’s Friend. Sweetwater on the other hand is primarily online, but they do have a megastore on their Fort Wayne Indiana Campus, with thousands of square feet of retail space open to the public. They formerly operated 7 different retail stores, but they were all absorbed by Guitar Center during the takeover. Musician’s Friend is currently run as an online only business. Being a relatively modern company (founded in 1983), they were quick to establish an online presence in the early 90s as the internet was just taking off.įast forward to 1999, and Musician’s Friend were purchased outright by music retail giants, Guitar Center in a multimillion dollar takeover, and to this day operate under their umbrella. Musician’s Friend had humble beginnings operating out of a Southern California Garage selling guitar strings via mail order. ![]()
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