Since 1977, Kitco has earned a reputation as one of the world’s premier retailers of precious metals. Kitco offers a complete line of the highest quality bullion bars and coins for investors and refining services for the jewelry manufacturing industry, as well as mill products.

Kitco's customers rely on them for superior service and the highest quality products at competitive prices. Kitco serves the needs of both small and large investors, as well as the precious metals industry.

To serve their customer even better, Kitco's services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the Internet.

To purchase precious metals on Kitco's web site you need to click on "Precious Metal Store" on the top menu of the homepage. Kitco has gotten rid of their "Complete Bullion Products" button, which displayed all of their gold, silver, platinum and palladium products together on one page along with their latest prices. Kitco's layout is now a lot more confusing. You need to choose under the "Buying from Kitco" section between the links "Kitco Rhodium Sponge", "Bullion Products", "Kitco Signature Products", along with some other choices. When you click on "Bullion Products" it takes you to a page displaying their gold bullion products and you have a choice to switch between other pages containing their silver, platinum, and palladium products. We liked Kitco's old layout a lot better.

Kitco does has a useful feature to price their items for sale in three foreign currencies: Canadian Dollars, Euros and Pounds Sterling.

For gold, Kitco offers a large variety of coins: American Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, American Buffalo, Austrian Philharmonics, and South African Kruggerands. At the time of our review update, Kitco was also offering a special Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games Gold Maple 1 oz coin. This is a unique coin for the companies in our review and Kitco was offering it at a price that was lower than the price for their regular Canadian Maple Leaf 1 oz coins.

At the time of our review update, Kitco’s prices were $17.21 higher than Bullion Direct for a 1 oz American Eagle, $26.17 higher than Bullion Direct for a 1 oz Canadian Maple Leaf, and $30.35 higher than Gainesville Coins for a 1 oz South African Kruggerand. Kitco had the lowest price for a 1 oz gold bar out of all the companies in our review.

For silver, Kitco's 1 oz .999% pure silver bar was priced $0.30 higher than Gainesville Coins at the time of our review update. Kitco's price for one 1 oz American Eagle Silver Coin was $0.46 higher than Lear Capital.

Kitco has a very confusing order process. They authorized our credit card to lock in the spot price of the gold bar we ordered, but they wouldn't accept the credit card for payment. Instead, they said that a wire, draft, or money order must be sent to them and dated within 24 hours. We forgot the next day that we needed to send them a money order. We didn't receive any reminder from Kitco until 13 days later when they emailed us a “Cancellation Warning”, informing us that our order was scheduled to be cancelled in 4 days.

Unfortunately, we overlooked their “Cancellation Warning” email and received an email from Kitco 4 days later saying that our order was cancelled because they did not receive payment within 10 business days. Kitco informed us in their email of their cancellation policy, which states that if there was a market price decrease in the type of precious metal ordered from the purchase order’s price to the date of cancellation, the difference will then be multiplied by the amount of ounces originally booked and that would be the cancellation fee, with a minimum cancellation fee of $50. However, because the market price of the precious metals we ordered increased during this time period, Kitco waved the cancellation fee.

Once we placed a new order and overnighted payment the same day, our order arrived in 11 days (7 business days).

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