#newegg.ca

Anyway, with those on the way, there were also some odds and ends of additional items I wanted to purchase. Like they only had the 17″ available with a 256GB PCIe SSD boot drive paired with a 1TB secondary HDD - and I’d rather have that second drive also be an SSD. HP lets you do things like change/add drives or RAM without it invalidating your warranty (they even tout how easy the case is to open as a feature), yet another thing I’m really liking about this purchase, so I decided to pop for a 2TB SSD to replace that with. I plan to stick the HDD in an external 3.0 drive enclosure; removing it should increase the battery life of the laptop, and I have a nice powered 3.0 USB hub I can plug it into for use (yay past me for planning ahead and getting a 3.0 hub rather than 2.0). Figure it can hold things like big media files where playback speed is not a real issue, ie, movies and music and photos.

So anyway, I’d never used Newegg before, but I didn’t want to throw money at Amazon, and Best Buy didn’t have everything I wanted, so I decided to try them out. Website is fairly nicely designed, their filtering is awesome (best I’ve found yet) so it was very disappointing when I went to submit the order and things immediately started going seriously wrong.

First off, it apparently timed out partway through submitting the payment. It landed me on a screen saying that the order hadn’t been processed, I hadn’t been charged, and to please try again. I stupidly believed that, and didn’t double-check (my bad, but still their site’s fault). So I redid the submission. It went through. Checked my email - yup, there was the order emails. Yes, multiple, they process every item ordered as a separate order and order # rather than as one set of multiple items, so I had 5 emails in total - received your order, charged payment for items 1-4. Ugh, stupid design, but whatever.

Go to make supper. A bit later my brother (who was kindly letting me use his CC for all this) came to check with me, very concerned - he’s received 10 emails. The order had gone through twice. So I leave off making supper, go upstairs to cancel the duplicate order... only the Newegg site says the items are invalid to cancel. What. The. FUCK.

Double check my emails - I have the second set of emails too, arriving a good 20 minutes after the first. I immediately get on with their online customer support, explain the situation, list all 8 order numbers divided into their two sets.

Customer rep can only cancel 2 of the 4 on first order, because apparently once they start packaging an order, you can’t cancel it any more, and despite it having been only around a half hour since I placed the order, some of it’s already being packed. Okay, so can we cancel the duplicates on the second order? She goes to look that up, I tell her exactly which two order numbers that would be, as I have the order screen open in front of me. Nope, she can’t do that one, lists one of the numbers she’d already cancelled. We go back and forth doublechecking, I again tell her what two specific order numbers still need to be cancelled. Nope, still can’t do it. Another run of double checking, list the two specific numbers a third time - and ffs, it turns out the problem is she hasn’t noticed the difference between a duplicate order ending in 79703 and the one ending in 80703 that she’d previously cancelled, which is why her attempts to cancel it have repeatedly failed. GAH!

By now we’ve been in chat for almost 40 minutes, and I have progressed from being merely annoyed to flat out frustrated RAGE. She finally tries to cancel the right numbers, and NOPE, those are now also in packaging. Supposedly my only option is to wait until they arrive, and either refuse the delivery (assuming I can identify which package(s) are those two specific duplicate items) or process a return. And while she says that a return wouldn’t involve a restocking fee, I can’t help but notice she’s not saying anything about shipping costs. Just WTF kind of poorly designed ordering system is this!? And who the hell doesn’t have a built-in buying remorse period of at least an hour before they start on actually shipping stuff?

Argh. Ugh ugh UGH. End chat, go to finish making supper, talk it back and forth with brother about what we should do (while feeling horrible that I ended up putting doubled charges on his card). So distracted I ended up burning the rolls for what was going to be meatball subs, and had to do noodles instead. Supper was very late, good thing this is not a day where he’s working nights.

Thankfully, someone somewhere successfully fixes it; after supper I found three emails saying they were “out of stock” on the duplicate items, and when I checked their site again, I’m now showing as having 3 of the 4 items remaining (and all with the button for me to manually cancel them enabled), and everything else cancelled (thankfully the one item they cancelled both of is just a 16gb USB key I wanted for recovery media, and I can get one of those just about anywhere). So, at least they made it right in the end, but that doesn’t at all help with the earlier frustration, and being so full of rage I was both nauseous and on the verge of tears, which is not a feeling I at all enjoy. Crying because of a heartbreaking scene in a book = good, crying because of a crappy customer experience = bad.