Tires are tires, right?  That’s what many people walk into their local tire store thinking, and often walk out paying hundreds more than they could have gotten the same tires for with a bit of planning.

When I needed tires, I called around all of the local tire stores first and was quoted from $220-250 per tire, plus mounting, balancing and other fees.  The total would be well over $1,000 for the set of tires I wanted.  Convinced that I could find a better deal, I turned to the internet and found a variety of tire stores advertising reasons to choose them over their competitors: “we have the best price, trust us” and “free lugs with every set of wheels” were some of the pitches that caused me to raise an eyebrow.

After reading quite a few reviews of tire stores online, one kept standing out as having repeat customers, which is a pretty good sign to me that the store has done it’s job right.  I checked out the website and found quite a bit more than just tire prices, I found honest reviews of the latest tires from Bridgestone, Pirelli, Hankook and others as well as ratings of tires from thousands of people who had driven on almost every tire out there, often for months before reviewing them.

In a twist of fate, the tires I had gone to the website to purchase ended up being rated fairly poorly, so I checked out the top rated tires in my segment and I’m glad I did – I ended up choosing a completely different manufacturer with better tread wear, noise and performance ratings, for the same price (well, within $10 anyway).

With the new tire in my cart, I proceeded to checkout - I was presented with options for which warehouse to ship the tires from, complete with estimates of how many days and how much shipping each would be. I liked that the total was shown up front, unlike some other stores which hide the taxes and levies until the very end. I chose to wait a bit longer to save another $30, but they ended up coming in just over a week to my house anyway - not bad considering the local shops were booked solid for two weeks.

In the end, I got my tires delivered to my door for about $400 cheaper than the best price I could find at a local shop - that savings includes state taxes, shipping, and having them mounted and balanced, so I really am comparing apples to apples here.

So who exactly is it that’s rated so highly and offers all this information with their übercheap prices?  Click here to find out, you can come back and thank me after.
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