SPCR

Just offering a friendly heads-up about NewEgg. They've screwed over HardOCP by reducing the commission from their links by 66% on Black Friday without informing the site owner that they were going to do so. Their reasoning? They didn't want return buyers. They wanted new customers. They also have horrible packaging, bad customer service, and will intentionally damage your return in order to deny you a refund or exchange. Since NewEgg has made it clear repeatedly that they do not want to be a part of the computing community, they'll not get any more of my money, and I encourage everyone here to voice their opinion with your wallet as well.

(For those wondering, Amazon will price match NewEgg most of the time.)

Considering I place many orders from NewEgg, I've never had bad service like this. I don't have any commission from sales, but I have never had an issue with their support either from the business where I work, or personally at home. Just about all of my new computer parts come from NewEgg, and I've never questioned it.

That said, I can't say Amazon is any better at packaging than any other online retailer I've ordered from. This isn't the first time I've heard of a smaller company getting screwed over by a bigger one, and I'm sure it wont be the last.

I've been a NewEgg customer since they started, and have been satisfied with their service. Sorry to hear they messed with HardOCP.

my 13 year old son just experienced the poor packaging from newegg. his first ever PC upgrade came to a screeching halt, with the smell of a burning GPU, because 2 of the fan blades on his new video card were broken off during shipment, and thus the fan could not turn.
-hey nothing like a catastrophic failure to get your feet wet in PC building/upgrading. still waiting on the replacement...

I've had a long and happy relationship with Newegg. It would surprise me greatly if they've suddenly become a bad egg.

Hi there,

I believe that many of us have had good relations with newegg. I also think that a good retailer is only tested when a problem arises and how they respond to that. On that metric, I do agree that newegg has slipped as they grew.

Around the problem with [h]ardocp. It's hard for us to gauge how much of the problem was due to newegg. [h]ardocp could have hid information from us, and we'll never know. In the end, that was a b2b transaction. Did newegg give a higher than usual commission than before. From a business standpoint, I can certainly see why they are more interested in new customers than old customers. In the end, money will speak. If they lose sales, they will bump the commission back.

Unfortunately, Amazon does not directly sell many niche items, and we are left with very few choices as enthusiasts. Maybe tigerdirect or ebay? Among computer part sellers. Newegg continues to provide some of the broadest selection, best prices, and good customer service.

However, I do want to provide an anecdote of cases where newegg was extremely unprofessional. It might be a result of slipping training or expanding scope, but was disappointing nonetheless. Newegg recently marked some marketplace products as "Shipped by Newegg" and "International seller. Newegg will be responsible for all RMA and general customer service." I ordered such a product and it was lost in shipment (never got tendered to USPS). I contacted a few newegg reps, who insisted that newegg is not responsible, even though I have linked them to the site that says so. In the end, the seller (based out of HK) was helpful and helped me contact newegg to issue an RMA, but the process took 4 weeks and was unnecessarily painful.

Did it stop me from shopping at newegg? No, but given a choice, I'd rather deal with Amazon's customer service.

My only complaint is that they cancelled a shipment of an "In Stock" item on me, saying it was unavailable. They refunded my money without issue, so no problem there. I usually avoid them unless the deal is great or no one else has the item, but that is only because of the slow shipping times to Canada. Never had any issues with damaged items.