Newegg has a bit of a scandal on its hands
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
I personally saw them try to pass off an expensive mouse that was crusty and scratched as "new" (I double checked and it was NOT marked as an "open box" on the product page or order page).
Newegg support refused to process the return, so I had to contest it with the credit card company. Pro tip: the CC support rep told me to process it as "product never received." He said if you pay for a new item and you get a used item, then you never received the item you paid for. Hopefully I never have to use that again, but now I know (and now you do too).
I’ve always considered a CC chargeback the tool of last resort, but companies are more and more slamming doors and dodging responsibility to the point where that tool has to be used all the time now.
It's also weird to me, for example I bought six items from Leatherman (some multitools plus accessories) and one of them showed up with some damage. No worries, Leatherman supports their product with a 25 year warranty so I just mail it back for a repair.
There was a whole saga about Leatherman refusing via email and my bank charging back for the entire order (I asked for just the tool that Leatherman refused to repair, the bank was "Nah, we're just gonna do it all, we have an email where the merchant refused to honor a warranty, they have no leverage.")
It's bizarre to me, because a relatively minor repair had to be cheaper than giving me three multitools and six accessories for negative dollars (since the bank tosses fees on top of the chargeback). The companies have no incentive and know they're going to lose (see all the articles complaining about 'friendly fraud' to reference chargebacks) yet they do it.
Perhaps they over index on being paranoid that the customer wants to defraud them via chargeback, which in turn increases the odds a chargeback happens since the disgruntled customer feels they were ripped off?
From where I'm sitting (business owner who handles my own customer support), this seems like a classic case of the business's incentives not aligning with the employee's.
Minor complaints are often much harder to deal with (and care about) than major ones, and far more likely to explode into something nasty. Couple that with the fact that the support rep doesn't see a cent of that transaction, and I can see why they would want to shut down the interaction ASAP.
I'm surprised that you have to do your own customer support, though. I had always assumed that Crowd Supply would take care of that.
I think Crowd Supply handle certain support issues specific to orders through their platform (as does Amazon), but there's still technical information that people need/want and so I help where I can.
For every person that does a chargeback, 10 of them don't know or don't bother. A lot of companies & services rely on that.
From the bank's perspective, this makes sense: better you keep your money with the bank than it flow out to the vendor.
Of course they'd have to come to my home jurisdiction and all that. While in theory if they prevailed I think they'd get triple damages, they also run the risk of losing and throwing away even more money and also angering Visa who considers my bank's ruling in my favor to be final. There were a few companies that had the genius idea to go to small claims and Visa got upset enough that those companies can no longer take credit cards.
In most cases it is better for the merchant just to eat it and write it off as a loss.
Not trying to excuse anything, just explain why some people are getting crappy used products (sloppy returns QA) or aggressive customer services denying consumer rights (burnt retailer). Ultimately it's all on the retailer, but it's also a cost we'll end up bearing.
Criminals ruin things for everyone.
There are tons more. The basic philosophy is that they use a bunch of social engineering techniques that are specific to companies and use them to get refund for people and then take a cut (usually 20-35%). The likely picked up these techniques through trial and error or from other people running similar services. Their most common targets are amazon, PayPal, almost all electronics retailers, tons of clothing companies, Walmart, target, Costco, etc.
what do you think the police are for? the FBI also investigates wire fraud cases. unfortunately both do not have enough resources to investigate $200 frauds. Hell, in some jurisdictions they don't even bother with $900 thefts.
But I'm not sure it's good to stop expecting the police to deal with this. That sort of surrender to criminality would be a dark step for humanity.
General beatdowns. Detectives are what you're thinking of. Most people want detectives, few people want harassment and fines (or death) over nothing more than some cop's power trip or petty things (like jay walking when it blocks no traffic and is completely safe).
Granted, this perspective is colored by American policing. I know some other countries have it better.
Five or more years ago I bought a kettle from Amazon and two months later it starts leaking. Turns out it's a design flaw and a lot of reviews on the kettle mentioned the same issue. I sent a support ticket and they refunded me immediately and told me I could keep the kettle.
Then last year I ordered a knife on Amazon. A month later I receive a water flosser...
I contact support (which is now next to impossible to find in the UI) and they tell me they can't refund me unless I send the item back and they also won't be sending me my actual purchase. This was during lockdown and as I do not own a printer I was not able to print out the return slip. They also refused to come and pick it up. I got nothing, not even a "we're sorry" coupon; my account is over 20 years old.
So we went from automatic refund + you get to keep the item for an issue that was not their fault to them completely fucking up my order and then making me go through hoops, spend me own money to send their mistake back to them.
The good news is that there are a lot of different and competitive online retailers around these days, and a lot of shops are now online due to Covid. So it was not very difficult for me to stop using Amazon altogether.
If you receive something in the mail by accident, you are under no obligation to return it. I would have issued a chargeback given that you never received the item you paid for.
> By law, companies can’t send unordered merchandise to you, then demand payment. That means you never have to pay for things you get but didn’t order. You also don’t have to return unordered merchandise. You’re legally entitled to keep it as a free gift.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-do-if-youre-bille...
> “All open orders were canceled, I just could access digital content purchased in the account. I had over $100 in my gift card balance and Amazon agreed to send me the refund, I received a check in my mailbox after 1 week,” wrote Do, who calculated that his rate of return for Amazon is about 17% — ordering 104 items and returning 18.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/if-youre-returning-a-lot-o...
First time in like 10 years I’ve had to contact support and was happy!
Amazon has many faults but returns have always worked well for me.
I guess their systems aren't quite as smooth here. I'd still be quite annoyed to have to go to UPS in my free time to return something I never ordered.
I bought some electronics, turned out it was a scammy company. After six weeks, nothing shipped, merchant agreed to refund me. Asked card company (Cash/Square/Block) for a chargeback. Week later merchant ships something, FedEx fails to deliver and it gets returned to merchant.
3 months later Square asks me for all documentation. I give it to them. They say I can't have a refund as the package was delivered. I tell them "yes, delivered back to the merchant". They say "sorry, our policy is that if it was delivered somewhere then we won't do a chargeback. I know that's not the outcome you wanted." Then they terminated my account. LOL
I've had to do chargebacks with two different banks and both were painless even though something was delivered.
But at least the other time a merchant pushed back on a charge back, it worked out better. A South American airline charged me for a flight between two cities in a continent I had never even been to in my life. They used as proof a record that simply showed the flight did actually fly. My bank sided with me.
Long story short, don't threaten lawsuits. Just file the suit.
And as someone who litigates for shits and giggles, it can be pretty expensive in Small Claims, about $400 often just to file and do service on the defendant. And some courts won't accept suits that are less than the filing fee. And a lot of the time you can't get back your costs from the defendant either. And.. I'm not sure you can sue the bank for not charging back. I guess the correct process is to sue the merchant for never delivering the merch.
No. AMEX heavily sides with AMEX against merchants. AMEX, via chargeback penalties, turns a net profit every time a customer complaint is filed. They aren't being nice out of the goodness of their hearts. They are leveraging their market dominance to extract penalty money from users. Just be happy that we customers are on the winning side ... for now.
Last month a fan failed on my 2080 Ti, which I bought in 2018, I contacted the retailer and they said they've started to replace fans on GPU's themselves because of the shortage situation. Great, works for me.
A week later I got an email saying they're replacing it with a 3080. Slight upgrade at no additional cost.
But while this is customer friendly, it completely forgoes the idea of individually judging returns! So now retailers are looking at the absolute amount of money they're losing to returns, and attempting to optimize that. They can't discourage returns outright (by changing their policy) because that would break customer expectations, and it would be extremely hard to inspect/adjudicate returns better because that would require skilled workers, so all they can do is adjust the false positive/false negative ratio.
Another black box approach is the use of surveillance databases like Retail Equation, to track whether an individual has made "too many" returns based on the amount they've spent - a totally irrelevant and unjust metric when you think about it. It also could be "just you" due to getting tripped by these databases, perhaps even because of your first chargeback. Who would know?
The "unfixable" waste also ties into the hollowing out of other business departments too. Many food items are not packed very well and are put in the same box without regards to density, so items arrived dented, crushed, or destroyed. Rather than the return process feed that failure back to the packing department, it's just treated as another "no fault" return. So now as a customer I've just got to accept that many times the items I've ordered are going to arrive damaged, and meanwhile I'm sure I'm building up a record in their surveillance database as a less profitable customer - when it all stems from their mistake.
I’ve never had a good AirBNB experience. I’d never miss them if they went away.
I assumed it would be an easy refund because it wasn't even safe to eat, so I sent them a photo and... they adamantly refused?
Charged that back and deleted the app. I was kind of flabbergasted.
Returning it would take me easily 30 minutes of work, so I decided to keep it until they start complaining.
Two weeks later, our neighbor came back into town and brought us the two original suitcases that we never received.
Trying to be honest, we started a return process. But we could not get them to understand that we didn’t want a refund. We were returning a duplicate. Since either way we were going to have “free” luggage, we just kept both.
Day 1: Left TX
Day 2: In transit in NM
Day 3: Arrived in Tracy,CA
Day 11: Left Tracy and arrived in destination city
Day 14: Left destination city
Day 15: In transit in southern OR
Day 18: In transit in northern OR
So the seller shipped a replacement.
Day 1: Left TX
Day 2: In transit in TX
Day 6: Arrived in Tracy
Day 7: Left Tracy
Day 11: Left Tracy, again
Day 12: Left Tracy, yet again
Day 13: Arrived in destination city
Day 15: Delivered¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now I have a cat-proof recycling bin.
When this happens to me, I tell the retailer that if they want to schedule a pickup at my address, I'll happily hand it to the driver, but I'm not going out of my way to fix their mistake.
Overall across the economy most fraud is committed on the way down, not the way up. The same happens as economic bubbles collapse and financial entities scramble for some way to inflate the books.
This makes no sense. Amazon has famously good customer service. I don't deal with walmart often so I don't have an opinion either way. Finally, you bemoan aliexpress, which is comprised of independent sellers, but complain how they're destroying "independent retailers"?
That is, after I received the product with over 4 months delay (after which I didn't need it anymore - hence trying to return it.)
I'm not sure if it's because the German Samsung store might just be too incompetent though.
It's nothing like doing a chargeback to a local independent coffee-shop who double-charged you and refuses to refund the duplicate charge.
10 years ago I stopped buying open-box items from NewEgg. They never, ever worked.
I had a theory that it was cheaper for them to ship it to another customer, and then if it got returned a second time, mark it as defective, vs doing actually DOA checks etc on their side.
1. GN gets motherboard from NewEgg, never opens the shipping box.
2. GN sends motherboard back to NewEgg, as allowed by NewEgg’s policy.
3. NewEgg decides to decline the RMA just because they can, claiming whatever excuse they are forced to make up when anyone asks. (NewEgg went back and forth regarding whether it was thermal paste on the motherboard or damaged pins on the CPU socket.)
4. GN knows they didn’t damage the motherboard, since they didn’t even open the shipping box, so they relate the story to their surprisingly large audience, and the whole story blows up.
5. NewEgg goes “Oops, bad publicity, we’d better refund them.”
6. GN wants the motherboard returned, too.
7. NewEgg goes “Oh crap. We said the motherboard was damaged, so if we actually send the real motherboard back, GN will see that it’s fine and know we lied. But GN said that they never opened the shipping box, so GN has never seen the motherboard. We can just send back any old motherboard which is actually damaged. Genius!”, and NewEgg picks a motherboard which is marked as damaged in their inventory system, and ships it to GN.
8. GN opens the newly-received motherboard box, and finds it indeed has damaged CPU socket pins, but also finds an RMA sticker from Gigabyte, with an RMA number on it. GN investigates, and finds out the whole history of that board, painting a very ugly picture of NewEgg if that was the motherboard which they were originally sold.
NewEgg is now in a bind. They can’t admit to lying about blatantly refusing legitimate RMAs, nor can they admit to knowingly shipping back a fake damaged motherboard to GN. So what they will probably try to claim is that the damaged board was the one sold to GN, but that it was a mistake in inventory management. However, this story still would not explain why NewEgg’s returns department missed seeing the huge RMA sticker from Gigabyte, and why they sometimes claimed thermal paste on the motherboard, and sometimes damaged CPU socket pins. Unless, of course, NewEgg lied and shipped a fake damaged motherboard back to GN.
Send a demand letter and if they don't respond, do the small claims court paper work. The hardest part is serving Newegg a notice. You can pay a professional to serve the paperwork. If you're willing to stick it to them, you will very likely see your $700 + fees. Most people won't do it because they feel intimidated or can't be bothered with the work.
Either way, this was 5 years ago and beyond the SOL
If you make a decision as part of your work, that decision is de facto made by the company. Even if this was one person making $12/hr who made every single decision related to this story, it's still Newegg making the decisions. Newegg only gets a pass if it's explicitly against all actual and de facto policies, and even then they may not.
But if you want to judge them, then I think it's relevant. Because just about every company is susceptible to an errant employee causing damage in some way or other. So do we want to judge companies on their policies and overall damage rate and probability ("how likely am I to suffer this fate if I do business with them, and what is it likely to cost me?"), or on whether they won or lost the errant employee going viral lottery ("did a bad employee work for this company once and cause damage in a way that happened by chance to become very public")?
Employees don't go out of their way to steal from customers and give to the company, unless management pressures them to.
It's the same here. If 1-2 people can make this happen, it's far more likely than if a chain of 10 people are needed to execute this kind of fraud.
I'm guessing this is a run of the mill "nobody's fault" failure of many people handling a small bit of the same situation, with their own poor incentives, leaving terse notes in the system, while nobody steps up to take ownership of the overall situation. The person receiving the board from Gigabyte didn't want to affect their metrics with the write off so they decided to put it back into inventory as open box. The person who inspected the RMA is trying to make metrics so they leave the shortest rejection note possible rather than noticing and investigating the Gigabyte RMA sticker. The CS rep on the phone cannot tell him anything more because there's literally nothing to tell besides what's displayed on their screen. etc.
Once you see this pattern, it's effectively everywhere these days. The other day I called a well-known brokerage company. I was transferred to the wrong department (like always), and the rep apologized while assuring me he would definitely get me to the right department (like always). My response was to casually tell him "no worries, I can ping-pong for a bit". Five departments later and I was finally in the right place. The people in the system don't even know how preposterous it looks from the outside.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30357038 . In the video linked here, Newegg stiffed someone on a $500 payment and then after it went viral suddenly offered them $1500, presumably so they'd keep quiet.
But then NewEgg would have admitted that NewEgg’s returns people lied about the motherboard being damaged. If only the returned motherboard had not had an RMA sticker on it, NewEgg could then have plausibly claimed that the returned damaged board was the same motherboard which was originally sold to GN, and blamed a mistake in inventory management, thereby admitting to a simple inventory mixup instead of admitting their returns people are scamming legitimate returns. But the sticker destroyed it; the sticker being there makes it both unlikely that it would have been sold to GN originally, but also makes it implausible that the returns people simply missed the huge sticker on the motherboard saying “From: Gigabyte; BROKEN CPU SOCKET”.
Instead, this situation is much worse - they sold a known-broken refurbished-at-best motherboard as "open box" (fraud #1), and then rejected the return for fictitious reasons (fraud #2), likely because the RMA inspection tech saw that the motherboard was an unsellable piece of trash and had every incentive to make the customer eat it.
And I don't see how the Gigabyte sticker being there indicates it was not the board originally sent to GN. It's completely plausible that meets the requirements for "open box" at Newegg. And IIRC nowhere on the sticker does it say that the CPU socket is broken, rather that specific history was obtained by calling Gigabyte and asking.
First of all, it’s just my personal theory; the sticker being there does not prove anything. But the sticker does say¹:
DAMAGED BY USER CANNOT REPAIR
[x] CPU SOCKET DAMAGED
This makes me guess that it’s unlikely that this was the same motherboard which the returns people at NewEgg sometimes claimed “Thermal paste on motherboard” on, and sometimes claimed that GN caused the CPU socket damage.
I think it's likely the RMA tech just ignored the sticker because they're used to seeing such stickers, if "open box" really is a free for all. The RMA tech's job isn't to look for reasons that something is Newegg's fault, but rather to look for reasons that it is the customer's fault. As such, a sticker that usually means the board was repaired by isn't something to note, but thermal paste is. And then once that note has been made, that's all the phone agent is going to ever see.
I imagine Newegg have a large inventory, but they would have to match the exact motherboard with the one Steve bought, and with some sort of CPU pin/socket damage. And the reason Steve accidentally bought an open box in the first place was due to the limited stock of that particular motherboard. So I'm not sure that this holds true.
>6. GN wants the motherboard returned, too.
Also I'm pretty sure Steve requested the motherboard back _before_ they then got the refund.
The null timeline of new egg just shipping an RMA'ed broken mobo in the first place seems more plausible to me.
The "This was customer damage" RMA rejection though I do not think applies. Hard to see any "honest mistake" there.
I used to work in IT support, started at $65k which was amazing for where I was living at the time. Everyone on the support team took pride in our work, and we shared a culture of expertise and owning the issue; of quality over quantity. Everyone suffers- the customer, the company, the support staff- when the goal is sheer throughput and 'cost efficiency'.
It's a long video[1] but another Youtuber called Brett from UFD Tech has been talking about Newegg recently too. Newegg agreed to sponsor a fan giveaway by providing an Intel CPU to a winner, but after receiving photos and marketing from Brett did not respond to inquiries about the CPU for five months. They also didn't pay for two product review videos that Brett had made for them. Like with GamersNexus, they didn't respond to inquiries about fixing the situation until Brett posted about it on Twitter.
Another small but interesting detail about this is that Brett never revealed the identity of his liaison with Newegg, but after making the video he received a photo from someone he's keeping anonymous that knows the liaison. In the photo, the anonymous person asks the liaison what is going on with the UFD Tech issue, and the liaison explains what happened but blames the lack of communication on him losing emails and not having Brett's contact information to make it right. A lie considering Brett was emailing the liaison during all of this.
It was sort of a profound summation of the state of customer service today.
(though, canceling orders is)
So there are counter examples still.
Pervades might be better, but fully agree with your comment/experience.
My level, to any peers who might know about the specific issue, to our management, and then to engineering (if technical) or our support VP (if business). And it was critical, because inevitable engineering "Oh, that doesn't work that way, but we never wrote it down" or "Oh, I guess that would be a thing people would want to do."
Sadly, after the company was bought the system was collapsed down to the standard front-line-or-close.
That’s exactly the point of scaling though. You’re using automation to replace a human component. It’s as true now as it was during the industrial revolution.
Unfortunately you can’t have it both ways.
Thankfully if you want to deal with humans then you can still buy from small independent outlets. But you then also have to accept that might come with a higher price tag too.
EU offers some protections here but not with services run outside of the EU.
I want to reassure you (or horrify you, depending) that poor and fraudulent customer service and products are definitely not a new phenomenon.
I see no big problem with that first part at all. Seems like a honest accident - stuff like that can happen. No big deal, imho.
But investigating the returned board - not seeing the RMA sticker on it, mis-classifying the damage, not checking their own records on the board - and claiming it was "customer damage" without any hard evidence... and not ever double-checking anything at all, after the customer repeatedly insisted they didn't even open the box...
That's the real problem. It's almost impossibly sloppy to miss all that during any damage investigation, it's outright offensive to claim "customer damage" without having done any investigation to substantiate that claim, and it's complete madness, to spend a lot of time insisting on "customer damage" in discussions with the customer, without ever double-checking the board, the damage or the records.
That's the reason why it's hard to believe this was a honest accident. Because if it was a honest accident... how could they have never noticed their accident, while "investigating" and refusing a refund multiple times over? With an RMA-sticker right on the board, dated to before the date of sale?
Doesn't that mean, that Newegg has no procedure in place to escalate contested cases to a higher-up or second person?
No way of dealing with customers who contest your findings?
Nobody looking at why a ticket still isn't closed after weeks, and has way more emails going back and forth than it ever should have?
Basically, if you send something back in, and have the bad luck to get some "single lazy or negligent" person answering your ticket - then you are screwed. Won't get your money back, won't get your board back, and absolutely nothing you can do to change that (other than making a YouTube video on a famous channel)?
There absolutely should be a way for a customer to contest those claims - and if all else fails - be able to demand speaking to a superior - and if that fails as well - at least get their board back.
Fraud and incompetence are indistinguishable. The outcomes appear the same. So should be regarded as different types of error. Without the messy bother of divining intent.
Got the server, plugged it in connected power monitor/keyboards etc - wouldn't boot.
Finally opened up the case and there was no memory, no video card and no motherboard and no drives at all - but there was a note from someone at IBM detailing that the server had been cannablized to use the parts for another machine (with all the required documentation of who took it, when and where the parts went etc.)
When I contacted the company that sold it to me as 'new / surplus' - they said it wasn't their problem, it was a warranty issue I had to take up with IBM, and they washed their hands. After many failed attempts, I resorted to tracking down the officers of the company via public records and harassing each of them personally by phone in the evenings and weekends at their homes until they issued me a refund. I hadn't paid by CC, so couldn't just dispute the charges.
In the 90's a fairly popular scam was to buy a computer from a traditional retail store, like JC Penny or Sears, and then remove the hard drive and RAM, exchange the computer saying it didn't work, and then you end up with a computer that has double the storage and RAM for the same price.
It wouldn't at Best Buy or Circuit City because they would open up the computer and test it out. But when some warehouse worker just throws the computer on a dolly and brings you out another, and you pay cash, it's easy to get away with.
In other words, stalking.
GamersNexus eventually managed to get the motherboard back, and took a look at it. Not only was it in terrible condition, there was an RMA sticker from Newegg to Gigabyte (the manufacturer). Gigabyte told Newegg it was broken and offered to repair it (for a price); Newegg refused, and then still sold it anyway.
(Actually, looking again, this is mentioned in the article, but it bears emphasis.)
You have a broken product. You may have already spent 450$ to get it, but that's sunk cost. You have 3 options:
1. you pay $100 dollars to have a working product (you can sell it for $500).
2. you can engage in fraud and sell this broken product.
3. you write off this loss.
if you discount committing fraud, then the 100$ repair fee definitely makes sense.
The seller must either fix or replace the item or reimburse the cost.
Afterwards, during the course of an additional year, it is the customer who must prove that any damage on the item was there to begin with, so that a faulty item can be shipped back to the seller.
This is a two year warranty which sellers must provide by law to the customer, regardless of any warranty terms the manufacturer attaches to its products.
Usually the seller will want you to contact the manufacturer and ship the item to them directly in order to not to get involved, but in this case the consumer is accepting to be bound by the warranty of the manufacturer. If this was not successful, he can still send it to the seller.
It is better to tell the seller that you won't be doing this, that you are going to use the seller's warranty, even if this may mean that the item will be gone for a longer amount of time because the seller may send it to the manufacturer first, to see if he can get the manufacturer to fix the item under the terms of his warranty, instead of directly replacing or reimbursing the cost of it.
Returns does not have to be free but almost all stores offer free returns.
Up to has asterisks and differs per country, here (Netherlands) it's 6 months.
It was 6 months in Germany until 2021-12-31, but since this year it has been changed to 12 months and I thought that this came from a new EU-wide regulation.
And the asterisks are in regards to "faulty" animals (stays at 6 months), and it's not applicable to B2B and C2C, at least in Germany. And some special rules regarding digital stuff like software.
I do less PC building these days, but I, too, shop with B&H if they have what I'm looking for (which is nearly always).
I did use them once last year for RAM. Took them 2 weeks to ship, then I cancelled the order. They shipped it anyway.
Although the overpriced premium cables are definitely still a thing...
After multiple rounds of that they gave me a phone number for the seller itself, which, when I called it, turned out to be something like a 2-person shop. Their recorded greeting said that they were on vacation for an extended period starting from before the date I ordered and upon which they printed a shipping label (which was presumably printed by a shell script or something).
Multiple more rounds of trying to get a refund from Newegg later, I just did a credit card chargeback.
That's standard practice for pretty much all of Big Tech. Official support channels? You can go fuck yourself. Get lucky and frontpage reddit or HN? They'll finally honor their commitments and put out a press release about how $BigCo is committed to $generic_ideals.
I watched a couple of the Gamers Nexus videos, and even the most charitable explanation is pretty damning. One of the related links on YouTube was a former Newegg RMA inspector, who gave some background on how things used to be done. Even if this is limited to open box items, which I would rarely if ever buy online, it gave me enough pause to pass on the SSD deal.
I wonder if there's just more warehouse theft from the volatile market/inflation. And more people trying to exploit systems of trust in delivery now that everyone orders online eg https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-customer-admits-290k-...
People buy a 500GB SSD and a 2TB SSD at the same time and return the 500GB one in the 2TB box. No one checks the return properly and it goes back to the warehouse and is sent out again.
I expect this doesn’t happen enough to affect margins enough to invest in doing something about it so it carries on.
When I brought this up to Newegg, they actually told me they do not test their Motherboard + RAM combos to make sure they actually work. I think it took me two months to get my money back as well.
Once, when I royally screwed up an order (I double bought a whole desktop worth of parts) they took everything back without any problem at all.
Additionally, they have been one of the most prominent companies fighting patent trolls.
I’m sure they have screwed up in big and small ways over the years, but they’ve also been serving the tech community well for a long time. Companies are large and difficult to manage. Hopefully they learn lessons from this and improve.
I literally just today finally got reimbursed from defective RAM (2 out of 8 sticks were DOA) I sent back on the _24th_ and it only happened because I contacted them every other day (I kept records).
Old Newegg was great. It's gone. I'm done.
EDIT: English are not my bestest
But instead of acknowledging the policy, you decided to harass some poor CSR every other day, who didn't have any power to make anything go faster than it already does. I really think you ought to take a moment to reflect on why you had such a visceral reaction to a completely innocuous situation.
[1] https://www.newegg.com/promotions/nepro/20-2902/index.html
What argument are you trying to make, exactly? Let me know, and I'll be happy to counter it. But as it stands, nobody got dragged over coals, nobody claimed anything as gospel, and yet you've made two outlandish claims that are completely illogical and definitely do not reflect any semblance of reality.
I'm reporting my experience and you are attacking the victim. Classy.
I directly linked to the policy that you agreed to when ordering, and instead of reading it, you've now doubled down on calling yourself a victim, despite the company exceeding all reasonable expectations. You are not a victim. You are trying to invent a scenario to get pity, but you are inarguably wrong on all accounts.
You said the time frame was January 24th to February 15th. By using simple math (only addition), I explained how they exceeded every reasonable expectation. They quite literally didn't do anything wrong, and you are publicly vilifying them for it anyway.
And that's old Newegg is gone?
You also badgered them every other day... which probably took a bunch of your time but didn't accelerate things.
I had to badger them every other day because the return label they gave me was wrong and UPS couldn't deliver and kept waiting for an update from them. It sat for ~ 4 days with nothing happening before being returned. I can guarantee you nothing would have happened as every time I spoke with a representative, they were discovering everything anew. I even had to teach them how to use their own tracking tools. Frustratingly, the official UPS site didn't have the same information as their internal site.
And your update doesn't change anything: They accidentally gave you a wrong label and it went to a bad address.
Already not a likely situation with automated systems, and not the interaction I'd used to write off an organization...
But then according to your own comment it got returned because it couldn't be delivered... you realize that just happens right? 3rd attempt and it goes back.
So to recap:
- you badgered these people of your own volition
- package got sent back anyways
- you still got your money back in an extremely reasonable timeframe, and in fact you're making it clear they were _very_ fast with your refund
Of course now you'll inform us how you left out the part where the Newegg employees said they intentionally sent you the wrong label because they don't like you... right?
That doesn't mean 95% of transactions with them won't still be the normal 'you pay the price and get the item.'
It isn't just about laws existing: In this case, it sure ain't legal for Newegg to sell a broken motherboard as working, and then decline the RMA. However, a user that ain't Steve from Gamer's Nexus will have no legal recourse that is effective.
In the EU, this issue has been tackled explicitly: Within the first six month of a sale, the seller has to prove that the item was damaged by the customer. This burden of proof reversal essentially makes the law effective (in this instance).
So would we get by relying on reputation? As long as the chance of getting a damaged item isn't overwhelming, people will still buy (see Amazon, which sells a huge amount of fake items without losing customers). It's easy to see that there's an mixed-strategy equilibrium here, and this equilibrium includes sellers sending out a certain percentage of broken or fake items to maximize profits. Sellers trying to maximize customer satisfaction is likely not the equilibrium. In other places in this thread we learned that customers are now being tracked as to what they return. Perhaps right now, this is for fraud prevention, sure. But if the data is there, it would be trivial for any good Data Science/ Economics team to maximize profits from sending out some semi-broken or used items here and there.
All in all, we need effective customer protection. A similar argument holds for privacy. However, both the US and the EU have enacted consumer protection or privacy laws that are ineffective.
> 1. Any lack of conformity which becomes apparent within one year of the time when the goods were delivered shall be presumed to have existed at the time when the goods were delivered, unless proved otherwise or unless this presumption is incompatible with the nature of the goods or with the nature of the lack of conformity. This paragraph shall also apply to goods with digital elements.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...
I believe it's this one:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
codified in Germany as §477 BGB (other countries accordingly)
edit: Article 11
Burden of proof
1. Any lack of conformity which becomes apparent within one year of the time when the goods were delivered shall be presumed to have existed at the time when the goods were delivered, unless proved otherwise or unless this presumption is incompatible with the nature of the goods or with the nature of the lack of conformity. This paragraph shall also apply to goods with digital elements.
2. Instead of the one-year period laid down in paragraph 1, Member States may maintain or introduce a period of two years from the time when the goods were delivered.
After 6 months you may need to prove that the defect existed when you bought it.
[0] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua....
I think around that time they started doing shady things like what's described in the article, opened up a third-party marketplace of some kind (have to be careful not to order your stuff used from a 3rd party seller based in China), and generally went downhill as far as user-experience.
Apparently they were acquired by a Chinese company in 2016.
Their site also became much slower (why does it take 3 seconds for a sub-navigation to appear?) and now also sells a bunch of non-IT related crap.
From now on, I tend to buy things at Best-Buy or even ebay.
After opening all protection plastic was missing as well as the usb-c cable. Fortunately for me this was in the EU and burden of proof is on them but shipping used/broken products off as new also happens here. One interesting thing is they also screwed up since they offered a discount to use the opened product after which my position was far stronger as I could reject any attempt to send me another product and I could just dissolve the purchase completely as it meant they had offered a compensation sum which I could rejectnif unreasonable and they always are. (There is a lot of difference in eu implementations per country about rights of dissolvement of purchase so watch out with your local laws.)
Nice exceptions are always welcome and worth mentioning.
The CPU/motherboard combo didn't work, so after much ado we returned the CPU, and Newegg said it was damaged and wouldn't accept the return. I just thought he might have accidentally damaged it. It never crossed my mind that it might be fraud.
Newegg had an incredibly generous RMA program for a while. They even took back a water damaged laptop from me back in the day after a manufacturer refused to repair it.
They got hammered by people trying to force returns on parts of their GPU combos, but they still do pretty well even if they're a bit slow.
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What happened here is tangential to what 99% of people are talking about, an open box product really was damaged...
It just wasn't damaged by GN. So Newegg clearly didn't inspect it well enough (probably not unrelated to the spike in RMAs they're likely dealing with)
Now Newegg is saying all open box products can be returned no questions asked, so even that's not an issue.
Also not sure about how I feel about GN's theatrics here.
They could have used their without games like "we're flying across the country to knock on your doorstep whether you like it or not!!!". Feels like a content-first, results-second approach.
Newegg did inspect it when it was returned initially. They then sent it off to Gigabyte for RMA. Gigabyte quoted a repair fee which newegg declined, instead deciding to sell the product again to GN. The giant gigabyte RMA sticker could not have been missed when inspecting it again for GN's RMA.
"Giant gigabyte RMA sticker" wouldn't mean anything off to the someone reviewing an open-box RMA without a deeper inspection... in fact it likely gave them the false impression it had been repaired (which again explains why there was so much push back)
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Everyone's using this as a springboard to harp on Newegg RMAs in general, but this is an issue with their open box program, not their RMA department.
RMA department could have dug deeper, but clearly they didn't expect a manufacturer RMA sticker to mean it was not already fixed...
But alas, apparently precious few people read the article all the way so now "Newegg RMAs are fraudulent" will be the new tune. I guess it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, but you'd expect better from this crowd.
Gamers Nexus sent the board back without even opening it, Newegg didn't inspect the return to see that there was a giant RMA sticker between Newegg and Gigabyte where they clearly marked the board as broken, complete with inspection date. Again, that's a really big fuck up on Newegg's part, or just outright fraud.
Newegg also sent Gamers Nexus an email detailing how the board had "thermal pate" on it, "meaning that it was installed". And when Gamers Nexus got the board back, no thermal paste was found on the item, which was sold as an open box anyways. That sounds like outright fraud to me if they make false claims about the board's condition.
Like 5 seconds into looking they found the speck of thermal paste Newegg is talking about...
It's not much at all, but Newegg was (wrongly) under the impression someone was pulling a fast one on them, so it makes sense even that speck of thermal paste is a smoking gun that "no, you did use this thing"
If the RMA department opens the box, sees a giant honking sticker that says "REPAIRED: YES [ ] NO [X]"
Your argument is that they'd simply see the sticker and assume it was repaired, without reading the contents of it?
So if they even pay attention to the sticker at all... they're going to assume you tried to get it repaired before they're going to assume they intentionally sent it out with a "this isn't fixed" sticker.
No one here is sitting in their RMA department which is why it's better to just say "they didn't inspect it well enough" than to start conjuring up specifics of their process... which is why I didn't bring up the sticker in the first place.
The RMA department kept going back to GN as the cause of damage because they didn't expect a damaged board to go out, the sticker wouldn't change that. They could just attribute the damage to the user instead.
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My original comment doesn't even mention the sticker because unless you're realllly desperate to spill some dirt on Newegg (or get some views), it's pointless to try and read tea leaves on what happened in some room with thousands of RMAs...
From a higher level you can get some pretty plain insight though...
And that insight shows this is a simple case where both sides imagine the other is being fraudulent.
And open box returns being conditional is ripe for misunderstandings like that, so now the conditionals are going away.
You really think Newegg is making one claim at a time like a customer would?
It's so bizarre how some people are on trying to divine intimate details of what happened to paint this as malice or fraud when it's so painfully this is a basic problem with the type of open box program they were running.
It's a simple fundamental question: how do you prove use when the box was already open.
You'll never solve it perfectly, so now Newegg has given up on trying to solve it.
GN didn't do anything wrong imo, until they started with the theatrics about arriving at people's doorsteps uninvited.
Honestly the cringiest thing I've ever seen watching a grown man powertrip over a YT following.
I mean was he going to beat them up? Probably not despite the awkward pressure he was trying to imply by just... randomly showing up. But then the first plan was what, just stand there if they didn't let him in? Hunger strike?
It means that even if it got sent out by complete accident, they could not have possibly done a good-faith, trained for the job inspection when it came back from GN. That's a level or two beyond "didn't inspect it well enough". And they didn't describe anything about stickers or papers in response to GN's claim of having never opened the box, which is not acceptable either.
For some other stuff I turn to the manufacturer directly, like I will typically buy Microsoft equipment directly from Microsoft. I also check Costco, but they have exceptionally limited options.
Walking into my local PC repair shop, I found knowledgeable staff but prices that couldn't compete with B&H.
Did you ask them to price match? My local store is willing to match, or if they can't fully match at least offer partial discount.
This was in very early 2020 just right before everything got crazy so I'm not sure how it is now.
Though, with Brexit, my purchasing from Scan has dropped - less hassle ordering from Germany.
Plus we've got our own local version of https://au.pcpartpicker.com/ though I've had mixed success with that the past few years. Supply chains are still really screwy domestically.
There's a bunch of highly dubious vendors in AU, no one quite knows how they stay in business. Best bet is to search whirlpool.net.au for horror stories if you're about to make your first transaction with a new vendor.
After threatening them with the ACCC (and CC'ing the ACCC IN the email to prove I was serious) they "generously" offered to send the CPU back to AMD to be "repaired"
They apologized and then for several days kept telling me that they would find it and deliver it. They again called me to ask how the delivery went, and again I pointed out that they hadn't delivered it and didn't have my signature confirming delivery nor did they have a photo or even any tracking record showing that the expensive laptop had made it to my house.
The happy ending is that Apple was great and canceled that order and simply put in a new order to replace it was delivered this time.
During this process, it was possible to reach customer support for both DHL and Apple without difficulty.
I wonder if Apple couldn't use it world-wide tracking network to track MacBooks that are in transit from China to mail order purchasers?
Big box stores and Amazon have made the return process so painless and unquestioned that basic questions like "why are you returning this" can sour a customer relationship permanently.
Even as a personal seller on ebay unquestioned refunds are the norm (and will be forced on upon you if you as a seller try to deny a return)
"In 2016, Liaison Interactive, a Chinese technology company, acquired a majority stake in Newegg in an investment deal."
"In 2020, Newegg entered into a merger agreement with Lianlou Smart Limited wherein Newegg stockholders became majority owners of LLIT. Following the consummation of the merger, Newegg listed as a publicly traded company on Nasdaq in May 2021 as Newegg Commerce, Inc."
Don't know anything about it, but the timeline seems about right
My strongest memory of Newegg is this, which is quite the opposite:
I eventually got my refund and returned the product to seller, but it took something like 4 hours of phone calls over 11 different calls and 3 weeks and threatening a charge back. I haven't shopped at newegg since then and have been using Amazon since. Not ideal but they are much more reasonable about returns.
Customers are having to appeal to customer service repeatedly and often things are fixed with no explanation.
There’s a long thread on Mcarumors about the most recent iPhone upgrade program, for example.
I think it is a mix of crooked third party device inspection companies and outsized incentives to reject warranty claims.
But yeah i learned that shop always try to don't deal with stuff
it was months into the process that c level staff called me to apologize, and yet it continued for a month past that. the warehouse guy kept calling me over and over on my home phone in tones that i interpreted as threatening, sometimes five or six times in a row
they wouldn't speak to me properly until i had my bank claw the money back
i had been a customer of theirs for 15 years by then, and had never asked them for anything more serious than to check shipping availability. i guess that gets me no loyalty.
never again.
i had switched to them over price. a look at pc part picker shows that's no longer a good choice. every part i looked up had a better choice with a different vendor. live and learn.
Is this good writing?
*getting RMAd drives sold as "new".
And the ambiance certainly wasn't helped by the exit line waiting to be treated as suspected criminals, or the dirty look the security guard would give you when you opted to skip it. Loss prevention (including return fraud) is a difficult problem, but companies that respond by taking it out on legitimate customers aren't long for this world.
Disappointing if this is to become their standard operating procedure.
Building your own PC is too niche to support businesses anywhere but major metropolitan areas. I'm stuck picking what I think is the less bad option.
top kek
how predictable
Even if it had been a mixup and resold accidentally, they would’ve seen the RMA sticker when it was returned again, and they still tried to pin it on the 2nd buyer.
There is more to this story which strongly suggests that Newegg was told by Gigabyte that this motherboard was broken before they resold it as open box, but even if they didn't: you can't have the "don't manually verify every return before reselling it" policy AND the "refuse returns for open box purchases if they're broken" policy, yet they did.
And for bonus, GN tells they never even opened either the product or shipping box.