, at the suggestion of a friend. I found their Web site to be a joy to use, their prices excellent, their customer service good, and their order process to be painless and fast. Over the last few months, not only has Newegg dropped the ball on me a number of times, but I’m now forced to reconsider them as a vendor completely.
Exhibit A
A month or so ago, I needed to order a monitor. Shopping around, I decided to go with Newegg. They were about $10 more expensive than the Best Buy (a 5 minute drive away), but their shipping and handling was much less than the sales tax on the item at Best Buy (it’s a pricey monitor, the Samsung T240, which I highly recommend). Since I did not need the monitor immediately, I was willing to wait a few days for it, in exchange for saving myself a trip to Best Buy (the local Best Buy is a miserable experience) and to save my employer $15 or so.
The trouble started a few days after I placed my order. See, Newegg really cares about making sure that I’m an authorized user of my credit card. In fact, they care to the point where they run all sorts of verifications on my card. Their order process says they do this. When I first started using them, this process took a few hours. Now, it really does take the “up the 48 hours” that their Web site warns about. In this case, my credit card information could not be verified, since I had never added my cell phone number as a valid phone number, so I replaced it with the office number. 48 hours later, it told me that the address was no good. And so on and so on. Instead of telling me everything up front that was incorrect, I literally had to play tennis with them for over a week, with each round taking 2 days, before the order shipped.
When then order was shipped, UPS managed to lose it. This is a pretty rare occurence. I contacted Newegg’s Customer Service department to find out what I could do to get that monitor. They told me that I had two options:
- Wait 7 – 10 business days while they conducted an investigation with UPS, determined that my package was indeed lost, and re-send me a monitor (note: the re-send would be at the same level of shipping as what I had paid for).
- Cancel the shipped order and re-order the package. Their system would eventually figure out the UPS issue and settle it “behind the scenes”.
Of course, neither one of these was acceptable! What I asked for was to have them immediately re-send the monitor with upgraded shipping, and since the fault was UPS’, UPS should give them a free upgrade on the shipping, and they can handle their investigation in “the background.” The representative I talked to reiterated my choices. So I created a fourth choice: I cancelled my order and drove to Best Buy and bought it there.
Exhibit B
We needed to order a new server chassis for a project. Due to a mistake on my part, I had ordered the wrong part from Ingram Micro (note to self: just because a SuperMicro chassis will fit a particular size of motherboard does not mean that every SuperMicro motherboard of that size will fit the chassis!). Now, Ingram Micro is our preferred vendor, for the following reasons:
- Almost everything arrives in 2 business days from them.
- We have an account with them, so we don’t need to jam up our corporate credit cards with large purchases.
- They ship on time every time.
- GREAT customer service, we can even “haggle” with them if we can get a better price elsewhere.
However, Ingram Micro isn’t perfect:
- They have not been stocking many SuperMicro products lately.
- Sometimes you will order an item that needs to be shipped from a far away warehouse, and instead of paying more to get it quickly, they just ship it cheap and it takes about a week to show up; if you don’t carefully check the warehouse of each item before you order to see if you need upgraded shipping, you can be quite surprised when your item takes a week to arrive.
- Their prices are not as market-sensitive as other vendors.
- Their Web site is a pain in the neck to use.
So I would really love to have an alternative to Ingram Micro, especially since Newegg carries many of the SuperMicro items that they don’t have.
Because all of the other parts had arrived, and because we were expected to build the new server immediately, we paid extra for Newegg’s “rush” processing and a huge S/H fee to upgrade to UPS Next Day shipping. You would think that between paying a “rush” fee and a small fortune for a server chassis to be shipped overnight, that this would have lit a fire in their system. Nope! Our order was processed in FIFO order, and as a result, the item was not shipped until the next day. If I wanted 2 day service, I could have ordered elsewhere, paying more money for the part but less for a cheaper shipping, have it ship on the day of ordering, and get the part at the same time while saving money.
When I contacted Newegg’s Customer Service, I was told that, at best, I could get the “rush” fee ($3.99) refunded. Woopee. He also reminded me that the “rush” fee does not make any guarantees, and that the order page clearly states that it could be up to 48 hours unti something ships, even with the “rush” fee. The fact that I paid for overnight shipping was not relevant in the system’s processing of it.
What baffles me, is that I can place an order at Amazon at 11 PM my time, and it will be shipped by the next morning. I don’t even pay for shipping, since I have Amazon Prime, so it is not like they have any particular incentive to hurry. But Newegg only seems to have one pickup per day at their warehouses. On top of that, Newegg used to be quite quick on shipping. It is only recently that the things I order from them did not ship the same day, as long as I got the order in at a reasonable time (say, before 2 PM EST).
At this point, I asked if Newegg had anyway of becoming a “preferred customer” or an “enterprise class customer” (or anything!) that would allow me to get better treatment. You know, things like same day shipping. I am even willing to pay for it. But they don’t have such a program.
Conclusion
I am really not sure how Newegg can become a vendor to businesses like this. The simple fact is, when a business orders something, often, timely delivery is much more important that money. You don’t go with the cheapest vendor, you go with the cheapest vendor who delivers what you need when you need it. And Newegg is proving that they are not in the running to be on that list for me. I will probably continue to order from them for personal items and for non-critical items, but for important things? Not likely.
J.Ja
