That is insultingly low
Is Newegg shit now? It’s been a long time since I’ve used them. Probably the last time I built a new PC back in like 2018. Is this a situation like seeing an old friend from highschool only to find out they are a raging alcoholic? I’m just out of the loop and that seems stupidly low.
Yes.
They got significantly worse after they were acquired in 2016, and they’re effectively another dropshipper, albeit with a better search function.
So that’s what happened.
The last time I bought from them (a few years ago now), I chose to buy an item from them instead of Amazon, to support less monolithic companies and because they used to have good reputation. I did this even though it was a few dollars more for the same item (like $23 vs $20, I think it was a dvd drive). It turns out they were just buying the Amazon item and reselling it at the higher price, it arrived in the original Amazon box with a new shipping label slapped on top.
Newegg is a shop and a marketplace. Just like Amazon, they sell their own stuff, and they allow others to sell on their marketplace. If you buy a product from Newegg itself, it’s coming straight from Newegg, but other sellers will often just have stuff shipped to you from Amazon.
Gamer’s Nexus did at least one video on bad Newegg sale practices and customer service about 2 years ago. A fun watch if you like trainwreck stories.
A few years ago Newegg was bought by foreign investors and it’s now a prime example of the various ways in which bad leadership, focused on short term profits, can damage a company in the long term. Newegg isn’t the only company that is suffering from that short term thinking, but as it turns out, the audience for computer parts is a bit more critical and mobile than people who shop on Amazon, so Newegg has had a fast decline.
Is there a good alternative? I used to buy exclusively Newegg. It used to be so easy to put together a computer having a trusted source.
Wow, that’s a high-wattage discount on the Intel i9.
