You see a lot of reviews about companies on reseller ratings and other places. Most of the reviews rant and rave about pricing, especially online purchases. That's why a lot of people shop online, for the cost savings over a brick and mortar store.
But when you get down to it, there are reasons that you may choose a brick and mortar, or purchase from an online retailer with a brick and mortar presence (like bestbuy.com, sears.com, etc). A big one is the confidence that if something does go wrong, you can go to the brick and mortar and return a product (or attempt to anyway), or resolve issues with a real live person.
That just isn't possible with Newegg; they don't have a brick and mortar. For want of a better term, they could hide behind an unmanageable mess of contact procedures to stonewall a customer, while still appearing to try to help. At some point the customer would give up on their refund, and the retailer gets to keep their money.
But you know what? I have been shopping at Newegg going on... well... approximately forever. I started shopping there for the prices, but stuck around for the customer service. Newegg doesn't play games with their customers like some other online only computer parts retailers do.
Case and point, I ordered a 4 GB compact flash card from Newegg. It was about $20, not a huge purchase by any means. I needed it for a solid state hard drive for a firmware install on a Network Attached Storage device (a Norco box if you care). When I got the card, I popped it in the server and attempted to install the OS. The install failed after about 20 minutes, with a write error to the card. After a few more tries, I decided the card must be messed up somehow, so I fired up DBAN and wrote zeros to it, which took many hours. There was definitely something wrong with the card.
I was in a huge hurry at that point; I was not expecting to get a bad card. I had to run out to a B&M, where I picked up a 4 GB card for almost the same price (maybe $21, I don't remember exactly) and tossed that in the server. No problems with that card at all, so the card I got from Newegg was definitely bad.
I used Newegg's online RMA process, which automatically deducted a restocking fee from the retail price, and also required me to ship the card back. That was going to be annoying, I was going to spend $5 to ship a $20 card back, and get an additional fee taken out. I was going to get something like $13 back on a $20 purchase. That is not even worth my time.
However, it was worth my time to complain about what is clearly a broken process. Why would I be deducted for a broken piece of hardware? I was too busy to actually type anything meaningful; The RMA note I sent Newegg was 'read my review', and the note to Newegg on the deduction was a whole 2 sentences:
Why are you charging me a restocking fee for a defective product? Please remove that charge.
I didn't expect an answer on it at all, but sure enough, I got an answer very quickly from Maribel at Newegg though an email response. This wasn't even a form letter, this was a person actually typing; a grand achievement in today's age.
Maribel explained that the online system automatically deducted, and to contact them to have it removed if the removal is warranted. In addition, without me asking or even hinting anything, Maribel also said that I would not need to send the card back; she was direct issuing a refund that I would see in 3-5 days. Talk about great customer service.
Now, to give the entire story in the interest of this being a 'complete' review, I have ordered a ton of stuff from Newegg. According to my order history, I have 91 orders for a total of more than $30k over the last few years, so she may have checked that first and offered a direct refund because of that, but if she did, she did not mention an order history check.
This customer service is exactly why I shop at Newegg, even if they may not be the least expensive for a product. Price is not everything. Without customer service, you have nothing. And in my opinion, Newegg has everything.