Certain aspects of diamond appraisal haven’t changed in the past few decades. For example, how much money can I (as a private diamond owner) sell a diamond for in my local market? How much insurance premium should I pay for my diamond? etc. Diamond prices change, policies and guidelines are also dynamic, but they all take place in one diamond market sphere, where a professional diamond appraiser can find his way and all diamond dealers and retailers play by the same rules.

It seems that the E-Commerce revolution has added a complexity which is almost unsolvable. A diamond appraiser not only has to deal with diamonds’ prices range, or whether diamond fluorescence reduce a stone’s price by 1 or 3 percent, but has to figure out what do we do when the whole diamond supply chain system has been transformed? Well, actually it wasn’t transformed, but has actually been added a parallel dimension. Two different supply chains, two completely different diamond pricing guidelines, yet diamonds are still diamonds and an appraiser can’t give two prices for one stone, what can he do?!

The E-Commerce revolution has made diamond purchasing much more profitable. Online diamond jewelry stores often do business directly with a diamond manufacturer company. They don’t pay for maintaining an actual store, nor they even buy diamonds from the manufacturer and take hold of them physically. The diamond manufacturer usually lists its diamonds directly in the online stores which he makes business with. Once a diamond is sold, the diamond is actually shipped directly from the manufacturer and doesn’t even pass through the “store”. The economic risks that B&M jewelry stores and diamond wholesalers face are not present in this system, therefore fees are low, and diamond consumers buy their stones for less. Obviously many online jewelry stores actually hold the diamonds they sell, but they aren’t the ones which generated what I call the “diamond E-Commerce revolution”.

So let’s say one diamond costs $8000 in a B&M jewelry store (let’s say not an expensive store in b&M standards) and an exactly identical diamond costs $5000 in well know online diamond store. Mr. A. bought the first diamond and Mr. I. bought the online one. On the same day, both of them give their diamonds to the same appraiser to check their “true” market value. If the appraiser is old fashioned and not up to date with internet trends then he’ll probably think that Mr. A made a decent deal, while Mr. I did an incredible, once in a life time purchase. A wiser appraiser would understand the problem, but still what could he do?

I read dozens of online diamond store reviews, in which the customer was delighted to find out that a local appraiser stated the diamond is worth much more than the amount paid for it. With these two parallel diamond pricing dimensions no wonder that this situation happens so often.

What can be done? Two appraising values, one for the online market and one for the local one? Probably not. A diamond is still a diamond, and once a private person owns it, its value shouldn’t depend on where it was purchased. Moreover, a diamond appraiser should check only the diamond certificate for additional info, besides his own physical evaluation, and shouldn’t care where or how the diamond was purchased.

Online diamond shopping and B&M shopping are both here to stay, which means the two different supply chains will continue to co-exist. Let’s just remember that diamond appraising is no science, and with this relatively new complexity diamond evaluation has become even more flexible and unclear.