Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hooby | Hacker News Reader

Newegg had a broken motherboard, already tried to RMA it themselves, then (likely accidentally) sold it as open box.

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?

It is a really incompetent fraud attempt, they could have just removed the RMA sticker before sending it back. Steve of GamersNexus would still have been able to get the history from the serial number with the motherboard manufacturer but it would have taken longer to work it out but it would also have removed the plausible deniability of an error I guess.

My guess is that prior to this episode blowing up on YouTube, Steve was dealing with a single customer support/RMA person who was either extremely lazy or negligent (perhaps due to Newegg incentives) and there is no escalation path for regular people whom Newegg isn’t aware are YouTube stars. I doubt Newegg set out to defraud Steve or anyone else, but they put the structure and incentives in place that let it happen. And they probably know this happens to some extent due to the wealth of other complaints they’ve racked up. They choose to operate this way, though, so the bottom line is that their execs are ok with scamming a small percentage of their customers because it saves/makes money. That small percentage just happened to hit the wrong guy this time.

> Steve was dealing with a single customer support/RMA person

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.

Yes and:

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.

Eh, I’ve purchased a bunch of Lutron Caseta dimmer switches from Amazon Warehouse, and I’ve several times received what was clearly a fraudulent return (the switch is obviously not a smart switch and doesn’t look like the picture on the box). Clearly return handlers at Amazon are not careful at all — basically they saw a light switch and said “yep that’s it” without looking more than the 0.1 seconds required to tell it’s not even remotely similar to the item supposedly being returned.

Perhaps, but a big part of the value prop of NewEgg (to me at least) is "better than Amazon at not giving me damaged/fake product."

I don't think that's been true for a while and NewEgg is much much worse at fixing problems that do arise.

And it’s bound to happen. The issue here is that Newegg is not careful, as well as not trying to help the customer once they sell them something broken. Amazon makes up for it by basically blindly trusting the customer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com