Looks like they are undertaking a Prime-style service (apologies if mentioned elsewhere):
http://www.newegg.com/neweggpremier
I guess the selling point is free, expedited shipping and maybe the waiver for restock fee. You’d have to do a lot of business with them to make this worth it though…
— Alan
And possibly the special deals, depending. But the value in Amazon Prime is that Amazon sells basically everything on the planet and Prime means it ships 2 day (or faster, in some cases) for free, and they already have pretty liberal return policies and such. I guess Newegg does sell more than just computer stuff and electronics (though I hadn’t noticed before) but it still doesn’t feel like it matches up.
$50/year does’t seem like it’s worth it, especially if you’re Prime. But if you buy a lot of electronics/PC parts, it’s a steal. Especially if you live outside of CA and whichever else state they ship from. Their prices are often comparable or the same to Amazon, but no sales tax is huge. If you buy $700 or more in PCs, video cards, memory, SSDs, what have you, it basically pays for itself.
Also, I should add that a lot of retailers have belatedly realized just what a killing Amazon is making off of Prime, and they’re all instituting or have instituted their own version. We’ve discussed this in the Amazon Prime thread in the other sub-forum, but the amount that a Prime customer spends on Amazon compared to a non-Prime customer is staggering.
It strikes me as something akin to the local furniture store here which for $60/year used to offer free delivery plus 2% back. You’d go in and sign up when you were going to buy furniture, because the 2% back would effectively pay for the service and get you free delivery. With Newegg, if you’re going to build a whole computer this year, the shipping costs of the heavier items is enough to justify $50.
Of course this is really for folks who use Newegg as their supplier for building multiple systems (or repairing multiple systems). Sure, Newegg doesn’t offer wholesale prices but they’re very competitive and reasonable as a supplier for small businesses who do generic build/diagnose/supply computer stuff. And there are plenty such businesses since all the big retailers long ago abandoned anything but the “Cheap commodity box that’s essentially disposable in 2 years” computer model. Particularly for those of us in areas without either Fry’s or MicroCenter.
Now that I think about it, I’m hedging about Premier.
The thing is, most of the stuff you buy on Newegg is expensive enough to get free shipping.
The great thing about Prime is it lets you buy all those little things that you’d never buy online because the shipping costs negate any savings you’d realize over a B&M store.
mouselock - Yea, my immediate thought was “small PC shops and freelance repair techs would love that”.
I love Amazon’s returns policy, but I’ve been burned by Newegg. I can’t see purchasing this.
Newegg pissed me off once when they sent me an opened-box video card instead of the new one I ordered. The packaging and contents were a mess, but the card worked fine, so I kept it.
My anger would have been short-lived, except that Amazon started selling computer stuff at competitive prices at about the same time. And I was already a longtime fan of Amazon’s service, so I had no trouble with going entirely with Amazon. And it’s difficult to compete with Amazon’s zero-hassle return process, which I’ve only rarely had to use, but have been amazed at how easy they make it.
Then, last year, I signed up for Amazon Prime for the first time, and I’m afraid I’m so smitten with it now, I cannot shop anywhere else unless Amazon just plain doesn’t have it.
Nice to see Newegg putting forth the effort, though.