10:17 – Well, I’ve parted ways with NewEgg.
On Thursday, I ordered a long Ethernet cable for $11.95 with free shipping. The transaction completed normally, or so it seemed. NewEgg said it’d send me email to confirm the transaction, and I thought nothing more about it. Then, early yesterday morning, I hadn’t received the email so I went over and logged onto my NewEgg account. There was just the one outstanding order, with its status showing “Void” and a note saying that the order had been canceled and would have to be re-placed. I received no notification of a problem.
So I called NewEgg support and worked my way down through several levels of the auto-attendant menu until it finally told me I was holding for the next available agent. Then it said that instead of holding I could request a call-back, which it expected would occur within the next 7 to 11 minutes. So I punched in my phone number, recorded my name, and confirmed the call-back request. Sure enough, a few minutes later the phone rang. It played back my name and said to punch #1 if I was available. I did that. It rang twice and went to dead air. I sat there like a fool saying “Hello? Hello?” with no response. So I shut up and waited. A minute or so later, it disconnected me.
So I called NewEgg support again, worked my way down through several levels of the auto-attendant menu until it again told me I was holding for the next available agent. That agent told me that my account was “blocked”. I asked him what that meant and he had no idea other than that I couldn’t place any orders until the block was removed. I asked if there was a problem with my credit card being approved. He didn’t know. I asked him what he did know, and more importantly what he was going to do about it. He said that he’d call another group within NewEgg and get an answer. I expected him to do that while I was holding, but he said it might take several hours. It was then about 0900 my time, and he said he’d call me back no later than mid-afternoon my time. I told him to make sure my order for the Ethernet cable was in fact canceled, because I was going to order it from someone else. He said that order was irrevocably canceled.
I ordered the cable from Amazon.com. I’m still waiting for the promised call-back from NewEgg. Not that I’ll ever do business with NewEgg again. NewEgg wasted much more of my time than the $11.95 cost of the cable. What the guy should have done was apologized profusely and shipped me a free cable by next-day air. Even that wouldn’t have made up for the amount of my time that NewEgg wasted, but at least it would have shown that NewEgg was trying to do the right thing. So, the next time I revise any of our PC books, NewEgg goes on the not-recommended list. If they treat me like this, they’ll do the same to other customers. They need to look at how Amazon takes care of customers and alter their policies accordingly.
Very good company for cables – http://www.monoprice.com/
However, if you’re only doing one, Amazon with free shipping is usually cheaper. If you need a bunch, check monoprice.
I agree NewEgg is a shell of the company it once was, I too have stopped buying from them, almost a year ago.
I also agree that Amazon is the model to follow. Whenever I have had a problem, minor to major, Amazon has been responsive and bent over backwards to provide not just customer service but customer satisfaction. Even the Third Parties on Amazon are a step above the rest.
edit: Okay, I do have one complaint. Most of the “subscribe and save” items have gone from an additional 15% discount to only 5%. Also some of the items I “subscribe” to have been removed from “subscribe and save”, it must not be the money maker Amazon had hoped for.
As an aside, Costco is supposed to be revising its online site to be “better than Amazon”, Costco’s words not mine. Costco has a high mark to aim for.
I left NewEgg a couple of years ago. I ordered a WD caviar black hard drive it was shipped to me in a flimsy container. When I connected it to the PC I was building, the SATA connector broke off the little circuit board. I tried it anyway but the drive was toast. I called NewEgg, RMA’d the drive and sent it back as damaged. They refused to give me credit and said that it was my fault. I switched my business to Amazon who incidentally, packs their bare hard drives much better for shipping. BTW, I spend $500 to $1,000 per month on PC stuff for my 20 computers at my business so NewEgg really lost out. My analysis was that they really did not care.
Too bad we are not closer (I am in Sugar Land, TX). I have several 100 ft cat 6 cables that I am not using and could give you one. I bought them several years ago when I thought that I was going to move my business into a unfinished office space for 3 months. I should have shipped you one on Thursday. Oh well. I actually used them in my house for my business when my office building did not have power for 1.5 weeks after hurricane Ike.
With my Amazon Prime membership they are the first place I check these days when going to order something on-line, and more times than not they have it at a reasonable price and they get my business. And with Prime, I can order an $11.95 cable and get free two day shipping (sometimes even next day if I order early enough) without having to worry about getting my order total to $25.00 to get their free super-saver shipping. And the variety of what’s available still sometimes amazes me. For example, recently came across a new snack item at the newsstand in the lobby of my office building and was paying them $1.50 a bag – checked on Amazon and found them for $0.90 a bag shipped free to my door in two days: http://www.amazon.com/Gourmet-Basics-Smart-Classic-1-Ounce/dp/B003A0SRH0
For cables of all types and related widgets I’ve switched to monoprice.com. I don’t think I’ve ever ordered just one cable as their prices are good enough that it always seems worth stocking up a bit. Their selection is amazing; need a 100 ft Cat5e ethernet cable in pink? (Or orange, yellow, blue…) $11.17 each, but order at least two of anyting and the price starts going down. I’ve gotten network, USB, HDMI, S/PDIF, Toslink, and various adapters (HDMI right-angle and such). And I picked up a couple of their 10/100 8-port ethernet switches ($17.10 for the pair); they work fine.
I haven’t done enough business there for a statistically valid sample, but nothing has gone wrong yet.
Virtual hold. Oddly I had exactly the same experience as you did yesterday morning with the Calif DMV. When I called back I was smart enough to avoid most of the menu by just pushing zero after I selected English. This time I just placed my phone on speaker and listened to bad music for maybe 5 minutes. Really the agent was pretty helpful. I was trying to get tags on an older car that was having trouble passing California’s new higher Nox levels. some $250 worth of work it had passed and now I wanted the actual tags (I had already paid all my fees). He said he could mail them, I could go to a DMV office or go to AAA if I was a member. I of course decided AAA would be the right choice and thanked him. I decided against making a crass comment about the virtual hold since he was pleasant and helpful. 10 min dive to AAA and 10 min wait and I had my tags. Amazing!
Ever since I went on Amazon Prime it’s become my first choice for everything. Second, go to Google shopping.
Monoprice has get deals. I’m lucky we have an electronics wholesaler in town that has a wide selection of patch cables from 18″ to 100′ in lots of colors at low prices. I like to match office decor when installing for clients. I’ve never needed pink but they don’t have that either.
Thanks for the heads-up on New Egg. I am about to place a fairly large order, and they were in the running. Not now, though.
I cannot say that I have had flawless service with Amazon, however. I bought some headphones from them for a couple hundred; they turned out to be complete trash, but returning them proved quite a chore and they demanded that I insure them for much more than they were worth. Consequently, I never use Amazon for speculative purchases anymore.
On that same purchase, when I requested the return authorization, they sent me an email telling me that I must precisely obey their return shipping instructions, and that the cost of shipping could be over $1,000. After hearing nothing from them for a week, I tried to call, but there was no number that could speak to returns or return policy. More email to them resulted in the verbatim identical email as the first, telling me to do nothing until I heard from them. At that, I immediately took the stuff to UPS and shipped it the cheapest possible way with no insurance but delivery confirmation, using the return labels in the original package (I bought some other stuff that came in the same shipment). Within a week, I had been credited the full purchase price.
Not sure what they were trying to accomplish with the demand that I wait, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt, as it turned out okay.
In a DIY forum I frequent, people there are high on PC Connection Express. It is a mail order firm from way back, that has successfully bridged the gap to Internet selling. They are located in southern New Hampshire.
During the last several years, I have had several items that were dead out of the box. Those included a 2.5” hard drive, an audio cassette recorder/player, a mouse, a power brick, and a 3.5” external hard drive. It is really distressing to hear Lynn’s story of no credit on the return, because I think poor quality control is a major problem in manufacturing today. How are you supposed to know an item is dead without hooking it up? But yet, if you hook it up, it then has to be your fault that it is dead?
They refused to give me credit and said that it was my fault.
That’s the reason I consistently use my AmEx for mail-order purchases – never been refused on a chargeback in a dispute with a merchant on a defective product.
Yeah, I used to order from PC Connection, probably 20 years ago. They were unusual for the time in having free shipping. Their prices weren’t always the best, but they were at least competitive counting the free shipping and their customer service was excellent. I stopped buying from them because they gradually became uncompetitive pricewise to a large enough extent that it no longer made sense to order from them. I’ll check them out again.
For cables of all types and related widgets I’ve switched to monoprice.com.
Definitely agree on Monoprice for all type of cables, especially in quantity. My only slight negative is they’re on the West coast and I’m East coast so standard shipping can take a few days. Another benefit of Amazon Prime is upgrading to one-day shipping for only $3.99 (although unless that’s absolutely a must I try to avoid it as I’ve had two-day items arrive in only one day depending on where they ship it from).
My dead hard drive was not poor manufacturing control, it was poor shipping protection. The bare drive was basically shipped from NewEgg in a box with no padding to me. I returned it first to NewEgg who returned it to me and said return it to WD. I pulled a stupid and did what they requested. When WD refused to warranty due to shipping damage, it was too late to cancel my AMEX charge to NewEgg (past the 30 day window). I basically cancelled my NewEgg account at that point and told them so over the phone. They literally did not care.
I’m beginning to see a pattern here.
I canceled my Amazon Prime trial simply because it wasn’t worth $79/year to me. Their videos were nothing we cared about or couldn’t get on Netflix streaming (back in those halcyon days when it was working…) I’m almost never in a big hurry to get something, and stuff I’ve ordered by Super Saver usually arrives here in two to four days anyway. And I never, ever have a problem making the $25 minimum. I can always order something I need or will need for kits–another pound of gum arabic powder or whatever.
Roger that on monoprice, they are also in my area so I get my orders the next day.
Additionally, for an all-around competitor to newegg, I used to do a lot with Mwave and found them competitive pricewise and very good to do business with:
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/index.asp?px=PF&scriteria=INDEX
I don’t run a business and my collection of machines here for lab and learning purposes has been acquired bit by bit over the last several years, not all at once, with large orders from wherever. But I’ve bought all kinds of stuff from Amazon, where I have the Prime membership thing, for those years and have never ever had a problem with anything at all. Stuff gets here from Amazon-proper in two days or less, and items from third parties through them may take as long as a week or ten days, but I’m never in a hurry for those things anyway. I have only seen their prices beat maybe once or twice in the past couple of years.
So, YMMV, but I have zero complaints so far.
I’ve also had good luck dealing with Crucial for RAM, and in another completely different venue, from the folks at MidwayUSA.
The temp has rocketed up to 71 and the skies are blue and the sun is out, so life is good. And Mrs. OFD has returned from Kalifornia and is staying tonight at MIL’s so they can both drive up to Montreal tomorrow and take Princess out to a birthday lunch. 2.5 hours each way for an 84-year-old and a 57-year-old, both still sick with whatever this virus crud is that we CAUGHT from Princess in the FIRST place. I took a rain check on that as I do not feel up to that ride, through some of the bleakest and dreariest landscape and then into the Megalopolis of the North, screw that. OFD will continue working on the Winchester 1200 custom job and hanging out in the back forty enjoying the peace and quiet this weekend. And just finished Season Three of The Tudors; yes I know I am about six years behind everybody else. Just finished all the seasons of The Wire. And I still have 122 episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street to watch, having seen a few of the originals when they were aired; groundbreaking television about urban cops and criminals; The Wire is a sort of sequel, being also set in Baltimore, but so far as I know, none of the Homicide characters showed up in it.
but so far as I know, none of the Homicide characters showed up in it.
The character John Munch from Homicide appeared in one episode of The Wire, and there were several cast members of Homicide who show up in The Wire, albeit as different characters. And the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is also a worthwhile read.
Damn it, you’re right! Munch, aka Richard Belzer, was sitting at a bar, wasn’t he, in the last season of The Wire. No speaking part but I saw him. Not sure who the other Homicide characters might have been. And I read that book; it was good, a college prof riding around with the homicide cops, wasn’t it?
I’m a very happy customer of MidwayUSA 🙂
What sort of guns and ammo do they sell? The lot I suppose… 🙂
http://www.midwayusa.com/
Ahhh, I visited their site, now I’ll probably get a visit from Men in Black at 4 am.
In 3D, too!
I’ll just tell them about this crazy guy in NE who’s training his cats to take over the world, and give them your address.
Unfortunately, the buggers already have my address. But first they have to get past the cats….