Issues with Newegg returns have only been an issue since... well, forever. Especially the bit about stonewalling customers until the issue appears in a public forum, and then suddenly backpedaling. I've avoided them since 2012 or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108456
Y'all stuck it out longer than I did. I bailed on Newegg not long after they became a marketplace and not a sole supplier. It just took too long to use the site to be even close to feeling assured that I was ordering (and likely to receive) the parts I actually needed.
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 immediately quit using NE when they did the marketplace thing because they were getting pretty bad already at that point. No way I was going to deal with 3rd party shippers on top of Newegg's 0 customer service.
I did use them once last year for RAM. Took them 2 weeks to ship, then I cancelled the order. They shipped it anyway.
Yup, I'm not interested in marketplaces at this point, so B&H and Microcenter get the vast majority of my business (along with a local mom and pop electronics store). I even turned to bestbuy for some cables recently, I would've laughed myself out the door at that thought 8 years ago (I still generally avoid them but at this point I'd take them over newegg especially since they're usually willing to price match).
Honestly, bestbuy seems to have gotten better within the last few years. 8 years ago I definitely agreed with you, but in the last 2 years over half of my tech purchases have been from them. Their prices have been either matched or cheaper than Amazon, and not having the to wait on shipping is really nice. Plus, I don't really worry about counterfeit goods like I do with Amazon. Still nowhere in the same league as microcenter, but unfortunately there isn't a microcenter anywhere close to me where I currently live.
Although the overpriced premium cables are definitely still a thing...
The marketplace killed it for me. I ordered a prebuilt PC for my kid from Newegg without realizing it was from a third-party seller. The seller printed a shipping label which counts as "shipped" so my credit card was charged. After waiting a week or so and realizing from the tracking info that it had not in fact shipped, I contacted Newegg, which promised to contact the seller but didn't.
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.
>Especially the bit about stonewalling customers until the issue appears in a public forum, and then suddenly backpedaling.
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've bought at least two computers' worth of parts from Newegg, and generally had a positive impression of them, in part because of stories here about how they stand up to patent trolls. However, their reputation has indeed taken a dive. When they had coupons for 4 and 8TB Samsung SSDs last week, several comments on a deals forum pointed out this very incident.
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.
