I tried to order a laptop from Newegg.com earlier this week using a credit card. After two days I received a notification on the Newegg account (but not to the email address I had provided) that the billing address for the credit card could not be verified and that I needed to resubmit the billing address. I spoke with my bank to confirm that the address was correct and that no vendor had attempted to contact them to verify the address (Newegg had the 800 bank number as it is required for that exact purpose if necessary). I then attempted to reach a Newegg customer representative to find out what was going on. After 20 minutes of being on hold on their phone system with an additional 27 minutes left to go in the queue on their livechat help system by the time I got a customer service representative (call him CSR for short) on the phone, the CSR said that the reason that the order could not be verified was because the billing address and the shipping address did not match. This was completely untrue as I had the sales order confirmation email open in front of me at the time with matching addresses. The CSR could not provide any further explanation and suggested that I reenter the information exactly as it appears on my credit card statement which I did for both delivery and billing address. I asked him if there was anyway to expedite the order verification process after resubmitting and he said no but that if there was any problem with the order verification I would be notified within the next hour by email. I received no emails from Newegg the entire day or the next day. When I attempted to logon to my Newegg account that day there was a message that the account had been suspended. Since it was the weekend there was no way to contact Newegg as it provides no customer support other than during regular weekday business hours. I sent an email to their customer support through their website notifying them that I was cancelling my order since they had mishandled it during the verification process although it was probably already voided by the company already due to their incompetence (read on). Later that weekend I found I could not make any purchases online with the credit card as I tried to purchase the laptop (at a much better price I might add) from another online vendor. I called my bank to find out why the vendor was declining the card and after some investigation, the bank informed me that Newegg had tried to verify a totally different expiration date for the card than what I provided and tried to do so several times which prompted the credit card company to put a block on the card. After going through a security verification process with my bank the block was lifted. So to sum up, Newegg apparently is too incompetent to do something as simple as correctly verify a credit card account, too incompetent to provide an accurate reason for not being able to do so, and their incompetence resulted in my credit card being blocked through their mistakes. Additionally their CSR either was misinformed about being notified by email if there was any further problem on the order verification or failed to follow through with the appropriate steps to do so. Unfortunately this is much in line with what I have been reading more and more of regarding Newegg as its business has grown over the past years. I unfortunately did the initial attempt to purchase through Newegg at the recommendation of a friend and got nothing but trouble for it. Fortunately I found out afterwards that it seems they really are not very competitive in their pricing (they charged more than any of the alternate vendors I ended up finding) and have found a better deal with an alternate reputable online vendor that is willing to sell the same model for over 10 percent less. If the way Newegg handled the order verification process is indicative of their overall quality of service I would say in the long run Newegg did me a favor by highlighting their incompetence before I actually was charged for the purchase.
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