10:17 – Well, I’ve parted ways with NewEgg.
On Thursday, I ordered a long Ethernet cable for $11.95 with free shipping. The transaction completed normally, or so it seemed. NewEgg said it’d send me email to confirm the transaction, and I thought nothing more about it. Then, early yesterday morning, I hadn’t received the email so I went over and logged onto my NewEgg account. There was just the one outstanding order, with its status showing “Void” and a note saying that the order had been canceled and would have to be re-placed. I received no notification of a problem.
So I called NewEgg support and worked my way down through several levels of the auto-attendant menu until it finally told me I was holding for the next available agent. Then it said that instead of holding I could request a call-back, which it expected would occur within the next 7 to 11 minutes. So I punched in my phone number, recorded my name, and confirmed the call-back request. Sure enough, a few minutes later the phone rang. It played back my name and said to punch #1 if I was available. I did that. It rang twice and went to dead air. I sat there like a fool saying “Hello? Hello?” with no response. So I shut up and waited. A minute or so later, it disconnected me.
So I called NewEgg support again, worked my way down through several levels of the auto-attendant menu until it again told me I was holding for the next available agent. That agent told me that my account was “blocked”. I asked him what that meant and he had no idea other than that I couldn’t place any orders until the block was removed. I asked if there was a problem with my credit card being approved. He didn’t know. I asked him what he did know, and more importantly what he was going to do about it. He said that he’d call another group within NewEgg and get an answer. I expected him to do that while I was holding, but he said it might take several hours. It was then about 0900 my time, and he said he’d call me back no later than mid-afternoon my time. I told him to make sure my order for the Ethernet cable was in fact canceled, because I was going to order it from someone else. He said that order was irrevocably canceled.
I ordered the cable from Amazon.com. I’m still waiting for the promised call-back from NewEgg. Not that I’ll ever do business with NewEgg again. NewEgg wasted much more of my time than the $11.95 cost of the cable. What the guy should have done was apologized profusely and shipped me a free cable by next-day air. Even that wouldn’t have made up for the amount of my time that NewEgg wasted, but at least it would have shown that NewEgg was trying to do the right thing. So, the next time I revise any of our PC books, NewEgg goes on the not-recommended list. If they treat me like this, they’ll do the same to other customers. They need to look at how Amazon takes care of customers and alter their policies accordingly.