Nothing in life is 100% safe, but you’ll be happy to know it’s quite easy to be well protected. So easy, in fact, that you’ll have a greater chance of fraud when buying from your local jeweler! Since online purchase is often perceived as “dangerous”, the security measures that exist to protect online shoppers are extremely effective – lowering the chance of fraud to a truly negligible minimum.

So how do you keep yourself protected? Just follow this simple checklist:

1. Pay with PayPalPayPal is a method of payment widely accepted online. Instead of giving your credit card / bank account details to the merchant, you give them to PayPal only and they transfer money to the merchant on your behalf.

   PayPal also provide a rather extensive buyer-protection plan. If you do not receive the item you’ve ordered (or the item was falsely described), you can easily open a PayPal dispute. These are almost 100% decided in the favor of the buyer (especially when you are telling the truth), meaning PayPal will simply take the funds from the merchant and return them to you – even without the merchant consent.

2. Speak with the seller on the phoneIf you have doubts regarding the seller, ask to speak with a representative on the phone. It is much easier to establish trust when you’re speaking with a real live person. Ask the seller questions about the purchase process and make sure they are professional, experienced and serious. These are hard to fake in a 1-on-1 conversation.
3. Look for selling history / feedbackIt is nearly impossible to maintain successful fraudulent activity over time. There are many formal entities involved (PayPal, credit card companies, banks) who regularly investigate suspicious patterns. If a seller exists long enough (a year is usually enough) and has enough high value sales under his belt (a hundred is enough), it is usually ok to trust them.
4. Get a second opinionAfter you receive the purchased diamond, it is a good idea to have it locally appraised and authenticated. Most jewelers can easily confirm this is a real diamond. If the diamond does not live up to your expectations – return it. All online sellers should offer a no-questions-asked return policy – if they don’t, find one that does!
5. Start with a smaller itemI imagine feeling anxious before a several thousand dollar transaction. It is ok to start with a low value item from the same seller (around $100), just to get a feeling of how the process works and see that everything is as expected. If this goes well, purchase the high value item right after.

Well, after more than a few online diamond purchases under my belt, I can say with confidence that you definitely cannot ignore this option. Nevertheless, the more educated you are, the better you can take advantage of this fabulous online market (and not get taken advantage of in the process).

The main reason anyone would consider buying a diamond online is price. This is relatively straight forward, local jewelry stores simply cannot compete with prices available online. The reason for that lies behind the scenes of how the diamond world works.

Consider the journey a typical diamond makes from manufacturing to finally being sold to an end customer. A mining company mines the raw diamond material and sells it to a manufacturer. The manufacturer cuts the material into the diamond shape and the diamond is polished. The polished diamond is traded inside the various diamond exchanges until being sold to a loose diamond distributor. It may pass another local distributor before being sold to a jeweler. The jeweler sets the diamond and prepares the diamond jewelry for final sale to the end customer. This chain can easily become even longer. The jeweler can easily be a jewelry distributor who wholesales to a local jeweler.

Since every link in the chain makes a profit (which in the world of diamonds can easily be as high as the cost), it is no wonder the price climbs heavily as you advance down the chain.

Traditionally, the manufacturers in the beginning of the chain were unable to sell directly to end customers. This requires a great deal of logistics: sales people, customer support, distributed brick-and-mortar stores in commercial centers, consumer marketing, advertising and more. The online era changed all this. In a global village you can reach virtually the entire world using one simple website. Actually, in the age of eBay, you don’t even need that.

To make a long story short, the Internet enables private customers to purchase directly from wholesalers in the beginning of the chain. Your local jeweler simply cannot compete with that. If you want to make the most of your budget, online diamond shopping is definitely worth checking out.

PS – online diamond purchase requires some skill and knowledge, and there are things you have to be careful of, but more about these issues in my next posts..

The answer is quite simple, the first step is to grade the diamond and measure its different physical characteristics – such as weight, color, clarity and cut. When a diamond is reduced to its set of physical grades, it is much easier to compare it to other diamonds. The value of each specific grade in the scale of a specific characteristic is derived from its abundance in nature (or the market – if you wish to be more economically accurate). We will not go into the details of calculating the exact monetary value from the set of grades at this point. This post will only discuss a very important fact about diamond grading – it is subjective.

Let’s begin with the objective qualities of a diamond. These characteristics do not depend on who measures the diamond, and should always roughly return the same results (with respect to slight measurement accuracy margin of error). These physical characteristics include the diamond carat weight, size and spacial measurements such as the width, height, depth, table size, pavilion angles, etc. These measurements are usually performed with calibrated, high accuracy scales, and do not require any human intervention and judgment for the most part. This means one can theoretically place the diamond in a fully deterministic machine which will scan the diamond and provide the measurements in a fully automatic manner.

The more interesting diamond qualities are of course its non-objective ones. These physical characteristics require the subjective judgment of a trained gemologist after a thorough inspection of the diamond appearance and structure. These characteristics include the diamond color, clarity, cut grade, polish, symmetry and fluorescence. Even though trained gemologists grade in conformance to agreed upon standards and policies, in the end of the day, grading is partly a judgment call. When personal human judgment is involved, you are bound to get different results when letting different people examine the same diamond. It is no secret that there are recorded cases where the exact same diamond has been sent for 2 separate inspections by the same gemological laboratory (even one of the strictest such as the GIA), and these 2 inspections yielded different results. The results usually did not differ much, but this proves that there are definite cases which are debatable and aren’t clear cut.

It is easier to understand why judgment is involved by considering a specific example. Let’s take for instance the diamond’s clarity grade. A diamond clarity grade amounts the internal physical imperfections in the diamond lattice. Such imperfections include black carbon spots (inclusions), cracks, feathers, clouds and scratches. The clarity grade takes many different aspects into account, such as the amount of imperfections, their type, location, size, visibility and proximity. Since no 2 diamonds have the exact same set of physical imperfections, it is easy to see how reducing this endless combination of imperfections into a single grade is not an exact science.

In addition, we should not forget that each grading entity has the liberty to choose its own level of strictness and harshness. What a strict gemologist considers as a Slightly Included (SI) diamond, a more lenient one may consider as Very Slightly included (VS). None of these gemologists can ever be considered wrong, they simply conform to a different scale.

In summary, what should you take from this post? First, don’t be surprised if your diamond receives different grades when presented to different gemologists. Second, when selecting a diamond based on its grades, be sure to check who graded this diamond and inquire as for their reputation and strictness.

I’ll try to make sense of the many confusing aspects of online diamond shopping. Heck, there are a few tips that could prove helpful if you decide to buy from your local jeweler. The best way to get the most for your dollar is keep educated. I’ll do my best to share my knowledge, don’t hesitate to share yours – do comment.

Well, good luck and happy deal hunting!