I was shopping on Ubiquiti’s network today and one of the items that I wanted they did not have. So I had a chat with one of their reps and they recommended Streakwave (https://www.streakwave.com)
As I do with mostly any company I deal with, I checked their SSL certs with Qualys SSL Labs and was disappointed - F.!
I did tell Ubiquiti and Streakwave know about the issue.
After this the Ubiquiti rep guided me to a list of distributors. Untanglednetworks is the closest to me, so proceded to check them out. They are good (A), however the link that Ubiquiti has to them is http and does NOT resolve to https. I did try a https on them and it does exist.
This is typical of many of the commercial companies we deal with and while I wish they had a better site, we care more about their prices. Streakwave is a company that we use when making large quantities of equipment purchases, but those are done VIA ACH or compan check due to the higher dollar amounts. (they don’t and won’t have our credit card on file.) These companies are still very manual and you talk to a sales rep which is not my ideal way to order product as many times sales people just slow down the process.
For Ubiquiti equipment, I have had good luck with B&H Photo (https://www.bhphotovideo.com/). They are an authorized Ubiquiti distributor. Their prices and stock are reasonably good and everything is done with a very good website. Shipping was fast. Only issue I ever had with them was trying to cancel one item that was previously ordered but backordered and I couldn’t do the cancellation as it was the Jewish holidays and they were out for ~10 days. It worked out fine and the item was cancelled ASAP upon their return.
Beyond their front end website you should look at how their payments are processed. Typically if I can use paypal or visa checkout (or similar) I don’t care about their site. However if I’m filling out a form on their site with address / contact information then I’d certainly be more concerned. I’d prefer the payment processing company provide them shipping information etc…
I rather talk to a real human than a bot. There are some very helpful people out there just have to find them. I have the horror stories back in the day a new manager came in to a distributor I used and all the old reps and techs did the boot scoot boogie the new rep assigned cost me a 40K sale. The proble was the new manager wanted volume sale and did not want to deal with VARs. The best distributor was Gates/FA, they were based in North Carolina and if you got your order in by 3 PM it was on your door step by 10 AM next day. Gates shipped everything next day air for about as ground. They were merged into Arrow and became Gates-Arrow. Now it is just Arrow. Haven;t used them since I no longer deal with selling hardware, with a couple exceptions but they are direct buys.
