“If you go to a jeweler with a great reputation and you pay $300 more, it’s all about that lifetime of service. Mobley said, does not always come down to which store has the cheapest gem. But for him, the true test will be when he proposes to his girlfriend in a few weeks. He was gratified when the diamond was appraised for $19,500. “Even though the sites have good return policies, you’re tying up a lot of money.”

“You don’t buy four pairs and see which one you like,” he said. “I don’t think it matters if you’re spending $5,000 or $25,000 - it’s a lot of money.”Īnd it’s also not like shopping for shoes on Zappos.

“The biggest hurdle is not seeing it in person, not holding it,” Mr. In the end, he paid $15,950 for the two-carat round diamond. “There would be four or five retailers all selling it for a different price. number and find all the retailers selling it,” he said. “I could find a diamond, grab that G.I.A. The deeper he went, the more he saw significant differences in price for the same diamond. He began researching diamonds online, and went down a rabbit hole. “I wanted to see 500 different diamonds and go through them,” he said. His persistence caused one jeweler in Detroit to stop working with him. That exact diamond can often be found somewhere else for less. Two separate reports confirmed that buyers should be anxious when it comes to the price they are paying for a diamond. Like the travel site Kayak, Rare Carat is paid on a per-click basis it does not make money off the final sale of a diamond. They know so little about what they’re buying.” “We want to empower our customer with information. “Consumers are walking into stores blank,” said Apeksha Kothari, chief operating officer of Rare Carat, which aims to be the diamond version of Kelley Blue Book. The site has also recently added a tool that finds the best price for a particular diamond, because diamonds from one supplier can be offered across multiple retailers at vastly different prices. Both turned to Rare Carat, a two-year-old website that uses an algorithm to value different diamonds based on their qualities - size, cut or clarity, for example. Fennerty shared a trait: fear of getting ripped off in the notoriously opaque diamond market. But he acknowledged that he was out of his depth when it came to knowing why similar stones were priced so differently.ĭespite different budgets, Mr. So he began doing research and found that odd-size stones - say 1.47 carats, not the complete 1.5 carats - cost a bit less and fit into the ring setting and his budget of about $15,000.

Rare caret