Newegg Fail

If you haven't guessed, I'm a bit of a technical person. I enjoy having the freedom to choose my desktop operating system, my preferred web browser, my favorite word processor, and so on. I think a lot of computer geeks like that freedom. I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that Newegg (who sells a lot of computer parts for people who want to build/upgrade their own computers) tries to target people with above-average technical backgrounds.

The picture shows the error message I got every time I tried to give Newegg my address and credit card information, so they could make a lot of money from me. After the third time, I used their "live chat" feature to try to contact someone. The person was polite, and answered my question. But it wasn't what I wanted to hear: Customers who use Firefox tend to have problems placing orders. We suggest using Internet Explorer instead.

FAIL

So, let me just give you a little background here... I was actually just on ZipZoomFly's excellent web site where I found most of the same things I needed. However, they were out of stock on two items. This isn't the first time ZZF has been out of stock on things I need.

Instead of ordering a few things there and a few things from Newegg, I had decided to just place one order with Newegg since they had everything. I was also somewhat frustrated with ZZF's lack of inventory, and was considering making Newegg my new first stop on the web when buying computer parts.

I'm also that guy in my local community that fields every computer question from, "Why doesn't Word open this file my friend sent me?" to, "Do you think we should boot the worker nodes in this cluster over the network?" Besides my unwanted that guy status, I also happen to help many businesses (both local and around the country) with their technical needs, and I run the web division of the largest radio broadcast entity in the market.

I will no longer place purchases for these businesses using Newegg, and recommend people use other stores that can build a simple web site without the limitations we fought in 1996.