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It’s been touted as “the secret to buying the perfect diamond.” But is shopping for your diamond engagement ring through Rare Carat the best way to get a great price on a great diamond?
Rare Carat started as a diamond aggregator. Founded by Ajay Anand, Rare Carat calls itself the “Zillow for diamonds,” a way to easily compare the pricing on diamonds so you can get a good deal. Today, Rare Carat has become a more conventional retailer. Like most online retailers it offers consumers a database of diamonds from wholesalers around the world.
Instead of referring consumers to other retailers for a commission, Rare Carat now takes the orders themselves and makes the jewelry. They call this “a brand created on Rare Carat.” That’s why none of the retailer names sound familiar and there’s no way to confirm who made the ring or the quality of the craftsmanship.
So that listing page that looks like lots of brand competing? It’s really just a feed of loose stones from many wholesalers, just like on other online retailers like Blue Nile.
Pros To Using Rare Carat
Used correctly, Rare Carat can help you get a good price by providing a price comparison to better-known online jewelry retailers likeBlue Nile or James Allen. It provides an automated assessment of diamond value and you have access to human gemologists to give you an opinion, just like on other retailers.
If Rare Carat is willing to sell you the diamond you want at a smaller profit, you can save money.
Cons To Using Rare Carat
The most important drawback to using Rare Carat to find a diamond is that even if you find the best price, you can’t really be sure that you have found the best diamond.
Rare Carat itself explains this on its website: “A good deal score does not mean the diamond is high quality, just good value.”
So that great price you found might be on a not-so-great diamond.
The second drawback to using Rare Carat is that because you are buying from a technology company, not a jeweler and you don’t know who actually made the ring you are buying, you have to check the quality of the craftsmanship yourself. Although there is a guarantee, you can’t be sure that this tech company will still be around in a few years. After all, they’ve already changed their business model.
One of the vendors recommended by Rare Carat was Enchanted Diamonds, a company that closed suddenly, leaving some customers who were referred by Rare Carat without the diamond engagement rings or their money.
Are these brands actually brands? Who is behind them? That’s why we don’t recommend using the “wire transfer” cash option on Rare Carat. You lose the protection of your credit card company of something goes wrong.
Another issue is that since you aren’t sure who is making your jewelry the ring style or level of craftsmanship might not be up to the standards you want for your engagement ring.
An Alternative to Rare Carat
If you prefer to have your engagement ring made by jewelers, not web developers, you might consider StoneAlgo, which is a search engine that lets you search lots of jewelers at once. All of the vendors on StoneAlgo actually exist so you can read reviews and know who will be actually making your ring,
You can comparison shop using a diamond report number, quickly finding out if a diamond is a good deal and comparing it side-by-side with alternatives from all over the web. Stone Algo is the largest diamond marketplace, with a selection of 1,906,683 natural and lab-created diamonds.
And StoneAlgo includes some of the biggest names in diamonds, like Blue Nile and RockHer.
If you want a great diamond as well as a great deal, we really believe you should also shop for your diamond at RockHer. You’ve got nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain. Here’s why.
RockHer’s artificial intelligence tool ROSI not only searches our database to find you the best diamond value for your budget, it also assesses each diamond’s quality, weighing more than 30 different factors. It’s the artificial intelligence version of a gemologist. ROSI will recommend a great diamond that’s a great value, not just the cheapest option.
Although you can learn a lot by researching diamonds online, you don’t have the experience of looking at thousands of loose diamond listings to weigh what all the small differences in color grades, cut grades, proportions, and locations of inclusions really mean when you are looking at diamonds in real life, not in images blown up to paperweight size in controlled lighting. Will a diamond that looks the best in a video look the best in your own ring when you are looking at it in your home or office? It’s a gamble.
At RockHer, we aren’t just resellers drop shipping diamond inventory from our suppliers, we’re real jewelers, with three generations of tradition, now selling to consumers for the first time.
At RockHer, unlike Blue Nile and James Allen, the engagement ring you select will be made to order expressly for you, from scratch in one piece, to fit your diamond and your finger size precisely. We use the latest CAD/CAM technology combined with skilled hand-finishing in our Los Angeles workshop to craft engagement rings to the highest possible quality standard for fine jewelry.
We programmed ROSI with all our knowledge about what makes a diamond beautiful and the choices we would make for ourselves when buying a diamond: where to splurge and where to save in order to get the best value.
And because we think it's the right thing to do, we only use responsibly sourced gems and recycled metals. You can even trace your diamond to the source right on our product pages.
You don’t just want a better price: you want a better diamond too! And a better engagement ring, of course. With RockHer, you can have all three.