Considering another home improvement project?  If you are, and you are anything like me, your first trip will probably be to THE HOME DEPOT™ or Lowes™ to get the materials that you need.  What about Home Depot vinyl fence?  They have that too so you should be getting a pretty good quality product for a great price, right?

Better think again.

To compare, let’s look at the main thing’s we want as consumers; low price, high quality and excellent customer service. In other words we want value.  We want the best quality and customer service that we can get at a price we can afford.  So let’s compare The Home Depot Vinyl Fencing against Buy Direct Vinyl Fence and see what we get.  Part 1 of this article we will analyze the price aspect of our purchases and parts 2 and 3 will go over high quality and customer service respectively.

Low Price

Let’s compare one of the most popular styles of vinyl fencing; 6’ tall white vinyl privacy.  We will use an example of a 48’ x 48’ backyard with no gates.  To illustrate, take a look at the drawing below:

Since Buy Direct Vinyl Fence offers 8’ Wide Panels and the local Home Depot we called offered 6’ Wide Vinyl Fence Panels, we will need to calculate how many panels and posts are needed for each product in order to get the total price.  These costs are outlined in the table below:  (this comparison was made on March 23, 2010 and may change as time moves on please contact your local store for local and current pricing).

As you can see from the table, even the economy version that The Home Depot vinyl fencing offers doesn’t compete in price to our professional grade quality vinyl fencing. (For more on Quality see Part 2 of this article).

What about other costs?  At Buy Direct Vinyl Fence you do need to pay for shipping which will vary depending on your location.  However even when purchasing online from HomeDepot.com you will still be paying sales tax for your purchase if there is a Home Depot fencing store located in your state.  You only pay sales tax from us when purchased from Arizona.  Most of the time the cost of tax or shipping are a wash but even when shipping is slightly higher you still have quite the buffer as seen in the example above.

Other Costs: Notice anything about the number of posts when comparing the two products?  Since The Home Depot uses 6’ panels you will need to install more posts and buy more concrete.  In the example given it amounts to 6 additional posts.  This will add even more to the cost of concrete and will result in 25% more labor to dig the holes and install posts.   On many styles, The Home Depot also uses brackets that must be attached to the posts which add even more installation time.

The choice is pretty clear when comparing price.  Haven’t made up your mind yet?  Then look for Part 2 of this 3 part series where we discuss the Quality of the Product.  You'll be shocked as we reveal the shortcuts The Home Depot fence suppliers have taken to make larger profit margins by creating weaker, thinner, extremely low quality vinyl and portraying it as industry standard.  Stay tuned...

 

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