Discount Tire Direct - A Canadian Order That's Tough to Beat

Last December, I bought light weight 18" wheels to replace the heavier 19" stock wheels. I had been planning on doing it this summer but I was forced to do it at the time (find out why here). I always have several automotive parts website bookmarked. Whenever I want to buy something, I open up the related sites (in this case Tire Rack, Discount Tire Direct, 1010Tires, etc.) and decide (mostly) based on prices and shipping charges, the latter are often a lot for orders shipping from the US to Canada.

I ended up on Discount Tire Direct (DTD) because they had the best prices and they were very helpful over the phone. I was happy to find good service but was very disappointed that Discount Tire had the best prices.. let me explain. If you go to the home page of 1010Tires, you'll see "We are Canadian, Eh! All Canadian orders are shipping from Canada, Pay no duties, Pay no brokerage fees, etc." A clear selling message that if you're in Canada and you buy from them, you'll be paying less but that simply would not have been the case.

Let's look at the tires that I bought. I got 4 285/35/18 Continental ExtremeContact DW from Discount Tire. I went on Discount Tire's website, priced them and got an "out the door" price of $1,092 (US), $20 less than how much I paid for them in December. Using today's exchange rate, that's $1,184.49 CAD. Getting the same tires from 1010Tires will set you back $1,499.55. That's an additional $315.06 CAD.. very disappointing. You should expect at least as good a deal, if not better. And Discount Tire continued to impress.

A few weeks ago, over 6 months after my order, I was at the track and 3 of the 4 wheel centre caps fell off. I sent an email to Discount Tire with my order receipt attached and asked for a replacement. I got a reply the same day and the rep left his phone extension. I called, confirmed my address and he sent 3 replacement caps, for free. No questions asked. All I had to pay was duty and brokerage - $15. That's about the same as a decent, individual aftermarket centre cap. Shipping? That was free too.

I don't know how good the service is at 1010Tires but that area isn't lacking at Discount Tire (i.e. you can often be driven away from a vendor that has better prices because service is bad). If you have good prices and good service, that's very tough to beat. I won't blindly return to Discount Tire for my next purchase - I will research again but I can say for sure that unless 1010Tires or another vendor has a much better deal, I will be buying from Discount Tire.