Best Places to Buy Tires Online and Save Hundreds
What are online tire retailers, and how are they useful to shoppers?
Online tire retailers began shortly after e-commerce started in America. Tire Rack quickly established itself as the top dog in the early days. What Tire Rack offered had been impossible to find before, a quick and easy way to find tire options for your vehicle, along with reviews of those tires by drivers of vehicles like the one you own. This was a really big deal for those crazy folks like me who wanted to know how a new tire selection might feel and perform on their Civic Si or Mazda Miata. Before Tire Rack, much of the public-facing tire retailing world was represented by a guy at a greasy sales counter who would push you to buy what his employer had purchased in bulk most recently, or offer you a very limited tire model choice from his retailer’s captive tire brand. Tire Rack democratized the insider info about which tire was good at what, and on which cars.
Of course, the whole point of these sites is to sell you tires and tire-related stuff. Tire Rack again excelled at this. Let’s say you wanted some performance-oriented winter-only tires mounted and balanced on some steel rims. Tire Rack could do that for you and have them in your driveway in a few days. Before online tire retailing took off, solving that riddle was a hassle of surprising proportions. Tire Rack has been merged with another big tire retailer, Discount Tire. The two operate independently now, but they are one company at the end of the day.
Then SimpleTire came along, benefiting from the model and lessons learned, and has now risen to be a stellar challenger in the tire industry. SimpleTire is one of Car Talk’s favorites in the industry. We turn to SimpleTire’s vast amount of tire content and specs in our tire stories and give them the proper credit. The info is just so easy to find and sort out that we prefer the site to the manufacturer sites.
In summary, you can do a lot of pre-purchase research at online tire retailers. You can compare prices between them easily, and then you can compare the prices to local options you have for tires to see how different the cost will be. Sometimes, the cost difference is meaningful, and sometimes not.
Another benefit of online tire shopping is that all of these sites can now help you find a local installer that is convenient and closest to you. They have a partnership network that allows you to either bring your tires with you and get a certain fixed price for mounting and balancing, or you can, in some cases, coordinate your order with the local retailer and then ship your tires directly to them.
Pluses of Online Tire RetailersEasy price comparison shopping
Easy warranty shopping (Tire life estimates and warranty are similar)
It is an outstanding research tool for those who really want to dig in hard during a tire search for a special vehicle
A good pairing with mobile tire installation
It's a great option for those who have a local tire shop they trust
Minuses of Online Tire RetailersInstallation is a big part of new tire satisfaction
Warranty can sometimes be more difficult since the retailer is not your source of tires