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Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

Did you order Newegg or third-party? So many stores, Newegg included, are trying to be a 'platform' or something and allow third party sellers, but it makes the buying experience awful.

Arguably the worst things about buying from Amazon all derive from third-party sellers: long shipping times (from China, generally), commingled inventory, counterfeit products, faked/swapped listings... Companies like Newegg should be explicitly doing the opposite as a competitive advantage -- yet they seem to be copying. I don't get it.

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Yeah, one of the items was third party, one was Newegg. But I agree - you can't outcompete Amazon by trying to be Amazon.

Sweetwater (who I mentioned upthread) are great because they do musical instruments (and related) and nothing else. Deep domain knowledge, rich and well organized catalog, community of music nerds, and (as far as I've noticed) no third party junk.

A Newegg could theoretically do the same for computers and peripherals. (Find me all motherboards compatible with i7 and ddr4, with usbc, blinkenlights and onboard wifi - much easier on Newegg than Amazon, but unfortunately it suffers from the aforementioned issues).

I get it. I don't like it, but I get it.

Look for a Ryzen 7 laptop with 16GB RAM from Newegg. I mean specifically check 'Newegg' as the only seller. You get two choices starting at $900.

Then uncheck 'Newegg' as the seller and sort by lowest price. You get 24 of the exact same laptop from 24 different sellers with an $80 spread in price. And that's just the cheapest 24 items. There are hundreds more. They start from $650.

For every $900 laptop Newegg sells from its own inventory, they have have to source it, receive it, photograph it, inventory it, ship it, etc. For every $700 laptop from somebody else, they have to...well, do almost nothing. Somebody they don't employ does all the rest. They just keep their web app up and running. Granted, the development of the site is expensive. But it's not expensive per item.

So they can make $50 off every $700 laptop with a minimal expense of pennies per sale. Or they can make $50 off some $900 laptops that cost them pennies + $150 labor per sale.

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