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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

Fraud prevention can also be extremely annoying to customers when not done correctly. I've yet to be able to buy something from newegg without them cancelling the order saying its fraudulent. I'm not sure why they still continue to flag my orders considering I've contacted them every time and they've ended up authorizing it. At least now they don't immediately blame my credit card...

If it was a smaller company and more of an impulse buy I could see a bad system definitely hurting sales. I'd probably not order from newegg again if they weren't one of the few places that ship harddrives correctly and have reasonable prices.

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Years ago I used up my free digital ocean credits, wanted to start paying. They asked for more details which I provided, then asked for my facebook profile. A pretty unusual request, but I complied. They told me the names don't match up and just won't deal with me anymore. Literally gave me no obvious way to proceed. Felt pretty violating to give up personal info just to get brushed off.

Happily used AWS ever since.

Why didn't your names match?

Had it in the diminutive form. As in Deb instead of Deborah, pretty common in my home language.

Wish I could remember what the first step was, think it was pretty informal too, but can't be sure. Just remember feeling dumbfounded they wouldn't simply come back with another option.

Why should they?

I've had issues mainly with manufacturers web stores.

Fender apologized and gave me the part number for the exact model I wanted and suggested I try third party stores.

EVGA was annoying. They called me at 10 am to confirm details, put me on a three way call with my bank and I thought that was it. For whatever reason they tried to call me again the following day but I couldn't answer, when I called them back they told me they cancelled my order. They said my billing details didn't match (simply not true, I've used that address countless time and checked my order confirmation), and that my phone area code didn't match where I lived (no shit, people move...). I decided to just never buy from them again, since there are plenty of other GPU manufacturers.

At least EVGA tried to resolve it.

I tried to order from an computer component retailer here in Canada. They specifically called out that my information needed to match, so I went and logged into my credit card's online portal and copy and pasted my information directly.

However what I didn't think to copy and paste was my own fucking name.

After charging my card and taking my money automatically, they then seemingly manually went to review the transaction and found that something didn't match, though were apparently unsure as to what that might be. When I sent them a screenshot of my online banking portal showing all my information with a "Wtf?" their response was "Oh, it's probably your missing middle initial. Also we've already refunded your order so there's nothing we can do. You should have your money back in a week."

When I asked them why the hell on top of a completely user-hostile validation process they then make it worse by cancelling and processing the refund before even calling me or emailing to give me a chance to correct the information, their response was basically that that's how they have to do it and it's outside their control and shrug.

Needless to say when I finally got my money back a week later I spent it elsewhere.

They didn't actually try to resolve it after they said it was cancelled. They said they couldn't do anything about it and to get back in the waiting list (it was a GTX 1080 right after release), and maybe it'd work.

Nowadays I go out of my way to buy from big stores like Amazon that already have this figured out, rather than buying directly from the manufacturer.

Yep I've spent a lot of money at NewEgg and the tricks I have to employ to get a legitimate order through are constantly changing. It let me use a PayPal account for a while (then said it was fraudulent), then a CC with a US address (then that was fraudulent because it was a Canadian card), then Bitcoin only. I'm guess the last one should work for a while.

I have the same problem with IKEA, except their customer service reps lie and tell me it's my bank that blocked the transaction.

This ended up costing me a lot of time as I called my bank, tried the order again, called the bank again, tried different credit cards... eventually I figured out the IKEA reps were just lying, and they had flagged all orders under my name and address without telling me. Infuriating.

I bought a laptop from HP about a year ago, and they canceled my order after shipping it, having FedEx return it to them. I'm still mad about it.

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