Lgestle Quote
Well ewiz has banned me from being a customer due to me being vocal on the forums about the poor services when they kept having price mistakes around 2007/2008. Accidents occur, but the frequency and the length of how long these deals remained up was the bigger issue. Especially when people called and was confirmed the deals were valid, only to be told a few days later that it was an "accident". Keep in mind CCs were charged when the order was placed in some cases, so you needed to wait for a refund. The only company that I have dealt with that had similar shenanigans was monarch computer towards the end.
Every business has the right to refuse service, but my issue was they took little to no ownership of the problem, so instead they banned people that were vocal. I believe my response was fair, ie even on reseller ratings I didn't leave all negative, and asked on the forum why did they keep having these issues.
To be fair ewiz may be turning a new leaf (haven't seen to many "price mistakes"), but hope for the consumer sake they don't repeat. As for me I take my purchases else where and obviously doesn't help that I'm banned
Here was my review on epinions. You can see a trend from reselleratings and epinions in that the positive reviews are from people that don't need customer service, the one's that do are not happy campers.
I have made about 12 orders since 2005 with this company. Prior to 2007 I never had any complaints.
Begining in 2007 I was on a hunt for a hot video card that was released. I made the purchase at ewiz as they showed stock, at the price was above MSRP, but was a fair price compared to the market. A few days later I received an email that the item was out of stock, my order would be cancelled, as they don't backorder items and no ETA is given. Didn't think much of it as this happens, but still on my search 2 days later after the cancellation I saw the same item appear back on ewiz for a higher price. Thought it was odd that they had no ETA but somehow had stock 2 days later. Obviously as a consumer this made me question since it returned at a higher price, but at this time I wrote it off.
After that time frame they started having a pattern of price mistakes on several hot items which started getting posted on multiple forums (got to the point I didn't even make purchases but warned people of the seller history). Price mistakes do occur with etailers but what was different with Ewiz/Superbiz/Newbiz was they don't stock any item and they don't have a real time inventory (no notification off that on the website). What complicates this further is on many of these occasions they left the item up >24 hours, and explained later that they didn't "have access to the building to change the price".
Second time it was an employee error. 2 other times it was a fault with pricegrabber/pricewatch. While all the while no safe gaurds were implemented to prevent this from reoccurring and if you called Customer Service they confirmed it was in stock and the price was correct. This took pace between 2007 and late 2008.
It was so frequent that I only attempted 2 of these many deals and vented my frustration, as a customer, on reselleratings. It was a fair review, I did not list a score on items I did not have (ie returns) and gave them a good score for price. However, I was upset of the repeat occurences and the lack of motivation on preventing this in the future.
Long story short they had a decent price on a cpu 6 months since my last order that was cancelled, $4 dollars cheaper than a competitor. Figured I would give them another chance. Instead I was greeted with an email that my order was cancelled due to my "order history" and they have the right to refuse service. What was odd was that I never had any returns, always paid for my merchandise, and the only orders cancelled were due to the price mistakes they had or item cancelled because it was back order.
Not a big blow to a consumer as I have better places to shop, but due yourself a favor and take a look at reseller ratings. If you actually need customer support, there seams to be a trend.
I have only had 2 really bad experiences with etailers which I wrote a review for. Monarch Computer, which later went out of business and were caught delaying refunds to float cash, and ewiz.
I don't like to see any business go under but once the shift turns to blaiming the consumer for the companies poor practices, that boat is sailing in the wrong direction.
Goodluck ewiz.
The Thread I believe that got me banned. Keep in mind this wasn't the last time this occured:
http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=896637&page=16
I think everyone can forgive a human mistake, the problem is the frequency these are occuring. For me this occured just 2-3 months ago with the same company on a HD 3850that was also a hot product at that time.
For me, as a customer, I don't expect to be rewarded for a mistake, but at the same time what is this company doing to prevent this from reoccuring? Nothing as far as I can
see.
1) Why don't they have a realtime inventory, or at least a cap?
2) Why is nobody alerting, or at lease checking on the sytem after hours?
3) Why can they only make a change the following day at 9AM?
4) What is your business plan moving forward to prevent these from occuring? Send out emails and post on forums every 3 months? Because that is the trend as of late.
Obviously they don't need to answer to me, but at the same time they don't find it useful investing time to put these safe guards in place.
Look at this other price mistake the had 2-3 months ago:
http://archive.slickdeals.net/...?sduid=408812&t=814548
The excuse in May 08 was:
I work and represent Ewiz/Newbiiz. i am also the one that set the price for this by accident. it was initially for a different product and the person that i sent the file to upload, had the wrong file. this is my human error and our system automatically set it to limit 1 per customer. we found this late last night but were not able to get into the company to change it because of the security guards. we changed the price ASAP but obviously it was too late. if there is any hate, please show it towards me. as this was my mistake. we do put in our disclaimer a note that things like this may occur. we have brought the community many great products and great prices and we look forward to continuing that, but please don't blame the company for one mishap that was done by me. if youd like to blow up at anyone please email me or send me a pm. otherwise ill keep doing my best to bring you guys great prices.
Quote from NewBizzer :
1) Why don't they have a realtime inventory, or at least a cap?
Our office is located in silicon valley, and within a 10 mile radius we can get to Asus, Nvidia, ECS, SuperMicro, Creative Labs, and pretty much the majority of our vendors out there. If they are not within driving distance, the rest are located in City of Industry SoCal which where the rest of the guys are. If we do not have an item in stock, we can get it within the same day and ship out on the same day or next day. As a result, prior to this incident there was never a need to implement such a system, but we are looking into it now.
2) Why is nobody alerting, or at lease checking on the sytem after hours?
We are hiring staff to do just that. This is something we are doing asap.
3. Why can they only make a change the following day at 9AM?
This unfortunate incident blew up during off hours. Our offices do not open until 8:30am the next day.
4) What is your business plan moving forward to prevent these from occuring? Send out emails and post on forums every 3 months? Because that is the trend as of late.
The marketing dept decides what kind of promotion to run. However I assure you that creating price errors to generate traffic was never on our list. We worked really hard to get our rating up and above 9 on resellerratings, and we would never want to risk our reputation.
I can understand why some people feel that this was intentional, because the last price error was also an ATI card, so alot of the same customers jumped on this deal. Both of these issues happened via human error. We have over 5000 items on our website and it was a freak accident. Right now, the company is pulling some drastic measures to make sure this sort of thing does not happen again.