I’m pretty sure some of you have heard horror stories of bad customer service issues at Newegg. Recently, they’ve been getting hammered from all sides with people telling about their experiences.
Gamers Nexus had a bad problem with a board they purchased. The short version is they bought a motherboard, but didn’t end up needing it. They returned the board without ever having opened the UPS box. The RMA got rejected with claims of bent pins. After their initial video about it, they offered to discuss the problem. This video is the result.
I think once the Newegg folks figured out Steve wasn’t there to just attack them, things started to ope up a bit. Hopefully, some positive changes happen there. I would rather not have to buy all my PC stuff at Amazon.
It’s a long video, but if you folks aren’t familiar with GN, you should make yourselves familiar. They do stuff in this space nobody else is.
I get what I can from Microcenter, but not sure if that helps you lol.
I used to love Newegg, but honestly I stopped using it around 2011 as that was the last time I built a PC. Sure I’ve upgraded to SSDs on these computers, but got all of those on Amazon.
I shiftes from building PCs to purchasing used laptops. This occurred as gaming on my PC wasn’t a priority any more.
NewEgg was taken over by Chinese interests and has become totally garbage since. I ordered a cable from them for my DeskMini, it cost me $40 with shipping extra, and it didn’t come with the two tiny screws to attach it. I complained to the (3rd party) seller, and their response was “the cable doesn’t come with the mounting screws–there are no screws in the picture.” This is a totally BS response, so I asked for an RMA. The agent set the RMA up for my entire $300+ order, which was obviously not what I wanted. I sent the cable in under the RMA anyway, and they rejected the RMA and gave me 3 days to deal with it. Since they paid for the return shipping, I wasn’t closely tracking it, and I didn’t even see their email until more than 3 days. So basically they kept the cable, rejected the RMA, and didn’t refund my money. That is the last time I will ever order anything from NewEgg sold by a third party, and probably the last time I will order from them period.
I ordered from them pretty recently. Mind you, it was a router, but it had free shipping and got here fast. So it’s not all bad. I’m going to watch and see what they do. I’d love to use Microcenter, but I’m in Canada, we don’t have such wonderful things up here.
For us, the location of the seller is also important.
We had a lot of UK sellers selling to Germany, which was difficult, because in Germany you need a VAT (sales tax) number in order to book the sales against tax, in the UK, most sellers were too small to need a VAT number, so their invoices were always invalid, which meant organising a refund.
Likewise, sellers outside the EU usually try and fiddle the customs situation (false declarations, sending it as a gift etc. so that it doesn’t get import duty), which means hassle with the customs, at best you have to pay the duty, and maybe a fine, at worst the goods are confiscated and destroyed… Try getting your money back after that!
The sellers want to look good by offering the products at very low rates, but they are only cheap, because the import duty isn’t calculated into the price, so you end up paying the same anyway, if they do the paperwork, or more, if they try and cheat the system.
In the end, at work, we stopped buying from the UK or outside the EU, it just wasn’t worth the hassle and the risk.
