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Newegg has long been my favorite online retailer. As a computer hardware geek, and the Director of IT here at AI, they’ve always sold stuff that I’m frequently purchasing. Whether I was looking for a new motherboard for a system build for a friend, or even something as simple as buying some Ethernet cable for the office, Newegg has always been the site I go to first.

Newegg sucked me in as a customer really early with spectacular customer support. Two specific instances stick in my mind. I believe these both happened back in 2001. The first was replacing a motherboard after it stopped working after just a week. It was a super smooth process; they replaced it quickly without a ridiculous RMA process.

The second incident was a broken front panel on a computer case I bought. They didn’t even make me return the original broken case. They simply grabbed a replacement part from a case at their warehouse, and shipped me just the broken part. I was able to get on with my system build without any delays due to the damaged part.

People always ask me where to buy computer stuff. Countless times, I have said, “Buy it from Newegg. They may not always have the lowest price, but their prices are always very competitive and you can’t beat their service.” Regrettably, I no longer feel this way.

Once again, it comes down to 2 incidents. The first one was a 3 years ago. I was trying to get some extra remotes for my Nintendo Wii, and I found some for sale at Newegg. I bought 2, thinking I was all set. A few hours later I got an email from them saying that they didn’t actually have any in stock and that they were cancelling my order.

I was pretty annoyed, so I emailed them a complaint. They said they would give me a few dollars off of my next order. I can’t recall the exact amount but it was at most 20 dollars. I think it was 10, but I want to give Newegg the benefit of the doubt here. I was not happy so I emailed them back. I never received another response from them, and I certainly didn’t get that discount.

I wrote this incident off as an oddity in my years of positive service with Newegg, and I ignored it. But then, this past Friday, the same thing happened. For the second time, I had completed checkout at Newegg, and I was sent an email after the fact that my item was out of stock and my order was being canceled.

In the interest of full disclosure, this new incident involved a black Friday special. But honestly, in the 3 years since this last happened to me, I would have expected that they invested time and money into their system to prevent this type of thing from happening again. After all, according to their Facebook page, they are the 2nd largest online only retailer. They can afford to fix these problems.

In any case, I emailed them 3 times and haven’t heard back from them yet. From my perspective, this is now enough to form a pattern of a website that breaks down during the holidays, and a pattern of a poor customer service response to the people who are affected. Patterns I intend to avoid by giving other vendors my business from now on.

Between my business and personal accounts, I spent around 10 grand there last year. Sure, those numbers aren’t huge, but they aren’t insignificant either. And if they lose other long time customers from incidents like this, those numbers can add up. In addition to the fact that they risk losing the excellent word of mouth that made them so big to begin with.

Where will I shop now? Well, I’ve already got a couple of vendors that I consider reliable. I’ve got account managers at CDW, Dell, and Apple. They aren’t the cheapest vendors, but I like having a direct line to somebody who values my business, and there are situations where that is worth spending the extra money. I buy my memory direct from Crucial these days. There’s plenty of stuff I can get at Amazon, a vendor that has never failed me. For more urgent purchases, I can walk 3 blocks from my office to the local Best Buy.

For the items that I traditionally have purchased from Newegg, I’m going to give zipzoomfly.com a try. They have been recommended by a fellow hardware geek a few times. They don’t seem to have the vast selection that Newegg has, but their prices seem fair, so it’s time to give their service a try.

I miss the Newegg of old. I congratulate them on their enormous success, but in my opinion, they’ve had to sacrifice a chunk of their brilliant customer service to get there. I, myself, am moving on for now.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

UPDATE:
It seems Newegg’s big thank you to their customers is a $10 gift certificate. No thank you.
8:08:39 PM System says, Hello my name is Angelique. How may I help you today?
8:08:49 PM Joshua Rusch says, hi there
8:09:18 PM Joshua Rusch says, I had an order for a black friday deal canceled due to stock issues, even though I checked out on the site successfully
8:09:44 PM Joshua Rusch says, I’ve seen a few reports that you are honoring the deal on alternative colored laptops for people who checked out and had their order canceled
8:10:01 PM Joshua Rusch says, I’ll paste the exact message somebody sent me…
8:10:24 PM Joshua Rusch says, I was actually able to get a hold of an escalation rep @ 5pm, pacific standard time, via phone (800) 390-1119
Once talking to a live person, I insisted on being transferred to the escalation dept.
There, I spoke with a Becky and an Ivan. They gave me the blackfriday price on the exact same netbook in a different color. There are reports of other people doing the same as well online:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5563846&postcount=15

Good luck!
8:11:29 PM Angelique says, I would be glad to assist you. We are offering $10.00 off your next order with Newegg for the inconvenience.
8:12:01 PM Joshua Rusch says, What about the people claiming they got the same deal on the same laptop in a different color?
8:12:08 PM Joshua Rusch says, are they lying?
8:12:43 PM Joshua Rusch says, do you have customer service reps named Ivan and Becky, if so I’ll try talking to them on the phone….when your phone lines actually start working again
8:14:50 PM Angelique says, There were many customers that were inconvenienced by the stock situation, as such we have decided to offer $10.00 off a future order with our company.
8:15:17 PM Angelique says, We are not able to honor the sale price for all customer’s that were inconvenienced.
8:15:38 PM Joshua Rusch says, I have given this company over 25 grand in business over the past 3 years
8:15:43 PM Joshua Rusch says, you really don’t want my business any more?
8:15:51 PM Joshua Rusch says, http://www.alexanderinteractive.com/blog/2009/11/dear-newegg-so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish.html
8:16:09 PM Joshua Rusch says, I suggest you check with your boss, I’ll give you the other account number I buy under
8:17:39 PM Joshua Rusch says, Look at account #XXXXXX, also under my name
8:17:56 PM Joshua Rusch says, you REALLY want to lose all that business over 120$ or whatever it was?
8:19:28 PM Angelique says, We definitely value you as a customer, and that is why we are offering the 10.00 discount off your next order. There is nothing that can be done to honor the original price or else I would definitely take care of it for you.
8:20:32 PM Joshua Rusch says, hah, OK, well I’ll be adding this conversation to my blog post. 10 dollars does not say you value me as a customer.
8:21:43 PM Angelique says, I apologize that we were not able to offer you more in this situation.
8:22:23 PM Joshua Rusch says, It seems like a no brainer to me…give me the discount, and get another couple of years of business, but its your loss, I have other vendors.
8:22:27 PM Joshua Rusch says, Bye

UPDATE 2
I thought I’d include a link to the facebook posting in which newegg said it would be contacting the people that experienced the stock problem on their website. Click here. As you can see, there are many complaints there. Not all of them are about successful checkouts, but there are enough.
Also, here is the netbook that they sold me, before they canceled the order:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115576

Here are two of the exact same netbooks specwise, just in different colors. They refuse to substitute them in for the deal they originally sold me.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115573&cm_re=AOD250-1924-_-34-115-573-_-Product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115575&cm_re=AOD250-1924-_-34-115-575-_-Product

I have become something of a skeptic when it comes to polls and surveys. While they are the theoretical best way to get aggregate viewpoints of a consumer or user base, people’s inclinations toward self-perception make them inherently flawed.

Take, for example, this Accountemps survey on online shopping for the 2009 holidays.

“Most workers,” the release says, “plan to browse on their own time, a new Accountemps survey shows. Nearly four out of five (77 percent) professionals surveyed said they are not planning to shop online while at work.”

Isn’t that a nice statistic for Accountemps to give back to its hiring firms? Staff are hard-working and focused!

Except it’s probably false. For the survey, Accountemps had a separate firm interview 455 employees–a number of whom were probably concerned that their employers might be listening or getting access to the data, so they lied about it to sound good.

Other respondents probably said to themselves, “Well, I’ll probably browse a bit here and there, but I won’t actually shop until I get home.” So they got to say no, which made them feel better about their dedication to their jobs. And some people just didn’t want to admit that they goof around at work, so they answered the same way.

It’s impossible to determine from my desk what those subsets do to the data, but at the least, they make the original results much more suspect.

The perpetuation of self-interest and positive self-perception is a common theme in polls. Ai recently received client research that said a celebrity spokesperson had only marginal effect on the opinions of the people polled. To which I thought: well, of course the respondents say this.

Few people want to admit to a curious stranger that Roger Federer’s mug on TV is the reason they considered Credit Suisse for their asset management. But that image certainly influences people, even those who won’t explicitly acknowledge it. (Nate Silver’s marvelous poll aggregation during the 2008 election cycle reinforces some of this.)

Polls and surveys aren’t going away, and the insights they contain are often valuable and impossible to otherwise discern. But the questions they seek to answer may not always be fully answerable by a conscious group of respondents.

PostClick Marketing Blog has an interesting post on agency cycles, and the way an agency spends too much time on tactics and not enough on concepts. The suggestion is to swap “how” and “what” and let 95% of a project be about idea generation.

Great sentiment, imperfect logic. Companies that focus too much on ideas get criticized for being too high-concept; they wind up perceived as unable to get things done. Conversely, of course, executional organizations have finite growth curves and not enough creativity.

The answer we’ve settled on is the continuous feedback loop. As PostClick notes, it is not enough to generate ideas up front, then move into implementation. Better to integrate idea generation into the entire process.

Here’s how Ai does it:

1. Questions. From start to finish, everyone is encouraged to ask questions. How did a decision come about? What other options have been considered, and why? Is there a better way to achieve the proposed solution? We’re always creating, not just doing.
2. Multidisciplinary meetings. Teams convene regularly across disciplines to discuss workflow and brainstorm solutions–a business analyst reviewing wireframes, or a tech lead discussing design feasibility.
3. Continual feedback. Stakeholders are invited to give suggestions throughout a project. This feedback often raises questions that Ai may have approached differently than the client. At these moments, the process shines: much like a writer and his editor, Ai’s best client engagements benefit from strong feedback loops where tough questions improve the final project.

For us, it’s not just about what versus how–it’s about continuing to ask “what” during the “how,” and vice versa. Maintaining a healthy balance between the two ensures projects, and their teams, remain creative and forward-thinking.

In a presentation at Web 2.0 New York, Scott Porad of Pet Holdings talked about user-generated content (UGC) and how anybody creating content needs to be thinking about UGC’s impact.
Porad mentioned that filtering is the key to implementing successful user-generated content. Submissions on his sites are reviewed by a team of 15 or so initial “web-cultured” reviewers. Then they go into a secondary review area where site members then make the final call. One click by readers and the post goes back to the initial reviewers. Two percent of submissions are filtered out completely.
These voting mechanisms on content also act as a reward and encourage more participation when users know their submissions are appreciated.
Another notable point in Porad’s talk was the Amazon “did you find this review useful” feature. Amazon has this type of question on each review in their customer feedback section. I recently read a review on Amazon that stated:

This product will stop working after a year unless you pay them a $20 annual fee. Need more than 2GB of storage? Another 2GB costs you $10 a year. There are other products that record to your computer’s hard drive, and can even upload the captured images or video to the FTP site of your choice (most ISPs give you several GB for free). This product is just a bad idea, in my opinion.

Reading this and then seeing that 14 out of 16 people found it useful adds context to the products description and instills trust amongst customers.
This review stood out and helped me make a definite decision. User-generated content combined with good filtering adds an invaluable tool and resource to any site.

About a year ago I wrote a webapp called twitter2gtalk, which simply takes your latest Twitter message and sets it as your Google Talk Status. Shortly there after I attended an App Engine Hackathon (GAE) at Google NYC. At the hackathon, I started porting the app over to app engine. At the time, there was no scheduling or cron support in GAE. I created a hybrid app running between GAE and my webfaction server. My webfaction server would handle the cron, proxy out the requests, and do some of the longer running tasks (the limit on an app engine request is 20 seconds).

Now with the release of the Task Scheduler and Task Queues, you can break up a long winded process into the cloud. My batch was taking around 18 minutes to run, with about 800 users being processed each time. For each user the app had to get their Twitter status, then connect to Google’s xmpp server, and after a couple of xmpp calls, update the Google Talk Status. Even being single threaded, this whole process started eating up a lot of juice on the server. The rest of my apache processes suffered and the entire site slowed down

Using the new app engine features, I was able to do two things: 1) Move the scheduling into app engine itself and 2) have app engine do the bulk of the work, by having each user-update be its own task. These worker tasks are then processed anywhere in the cloud, and can be run in parallel, independently of each other.

The original code was something like:

for users in all my users:
get twitter status
connect to gtalk
get current status
update status

My process for converting this to app engine tasks was as follows:

1. Create a process to load all of the users into a Task Queue
2. Set up each Task Queue so that it can independently do the work for the user that it is associated with
3. Schedule Step 1 to run every half hour

Skeleton Code for Step 1:

class TaskLoader(BaseRequestHandler):
def get(self):
logging.info(“Starting to load tasks %s” % datetime.datetime.now())
users = Account.gql(‘WHERE active = :1′, True)
count = 0
for user in users:
send_key = # data to send to the worker
taskqueue.add(url=’/worker/’, params={‘key’: send_key})
count += 1
logging.info(“Ended load tasks (%d users) %s” % (count, datetime.datetime.now()))

The Url call for this method: (‘/taskloader/’, TaskLoader),

The Skeleton code for step 2:

class TaskWorker(BaseRequestHandler):
def post(self):
key = self.request.get(‘key’)
t = ”.join(["http://django.gpowered.net/xmppproxy/", key])
logging.info(“URL !%s!” % t)
result = urlfetch.fetch(t,
None,
urlfetch.GET,
{‘Cache-Control’:'no-cache,max-age=0′, ‘Pragma’:'no-cache’})

Url call for this method: (‘/worker/’, TaskWorker),

So, TaskLoader loads all of the users into the Task queue. App Engine processes these when it has the cpu cycles to do so, and for each of these, TaskWorker is called

I can schedule these using cron.yaml in my project:
cron:
- description: load the task queue
url: /taskloader/

schedule: every 30 minutes

This is a general overview of how to break up your batch in to smaller, easier to manage tasks. Please see the App Engine documentation for more detailed information.

One of Ai’s interns, Adam Picitelli, is celebrating his birthday today. As Ai employees, we get the perk of taking the day off on our respective birthdays, but Adam just loves it here so much he did not want a day off. When Adam came in this morning, however, he had no idea what was in store for him – a singing birthday telegram by a lady in a chicken costume, sent by Adam’s sister.

Video courtesy of Ai’s Tim Broder.

With the release of Android 2.0 on the Motorola Droid, the Google Maps for Mobile application brings turn by turn GPS navigation (with voice) to your car. A great feature by far, it actually made Garmin and TomTom’s stocks tank, but what does it mean for the future?

Currently adwords is all over the web; on pages, in your mail, on maps. Now picture this possibility and keep in mind this is all hypothetical: You are using Navigator to get you to the local movie theater and it randomly chimes in with “You are about to pass Joe’s Pizza!” This could be good and bad. Good because you might be able to set the navigator to find restaurants you’ve never tried and didn’t know were there. Bad because it could get annoying. Good because it would open up a whole new form of advertising for small businesses.

Either way, just something to think about, times are changing with all the technology we now carry around in our pockets.

A demo of navigator in action:

Steve Rubel: Five Incredibly Useful Things You Can Do Without Ever Leaving Facebook. “I am discovering that it’s becoming a one-stop shop for many of my day-to-day activities,” he writes.

The post strikes me as a retrograde observation. Not because Steve Rubel is any kind of Luddite, but because the online industry has, for more than 20 years, been trying to create a one-size-fits-all website. It still is. Indeed, it seems every big site aims to recapture the glory days of America Online.

In the 1980s, Compuserve and Prodigy and the like created online dialup communities. The winner in this space, of course, was AOL, which dominated for years. It became a destination for users and businesses alike. Every company in America needed an AOL presence and someone who could code in Rainman.

As the web’s ubiquity overtook AOL, websites began cropping up that attempted to reinvent the paradigm by … emulating AOL. Yahoo and MSN (and many smaller peers) created integrated online presences where features and options abounded and stickiness became the prime measurement.

Then search came to prominence and splintered people’s site use. Google’s success as an ad platform allowed Google Labs to create dozens of experimental services, all of which served to make Google more of a catch-all, and more like … the old, closed-wall AOL, just with outbound links.

Which brings us to 2009, where Facebook has captured the exact same mindspace as, yep, AOL. What makes Facebook interesting these days? Basically the same things that made AOL a star a decade earlier.

• private messaging without an external email client: just like AOL!
• live chat: just like AOL!
• integrated games and shopping: just like AOL!
• every company feels a need to be there: just like AOL!

And here we are again, with consumers converging on a single site and companies clamoring to capture their attention.

AOL was eventually done in by a lack of openness and charging for options that were free elsewhere. So far, Facebook has avoided those mistakes. It will be interesting to see what social and economic forces drive its future–and whether it ultimately becomes something other than The Next AOL.

When I find a bundle of interesting links, I send them in an email to all of Ai. I thought I would start sharing them here as well. I am always hopeful they will spark some conversation, so feel free to leave comments if you have anything to say.

• Beautiful HTML Markup – Learn some HTML standards (some of this is based on the forthcoming HTML5).
• Google Acquires AdMob for $750 Million in Stock – Google buys mobile advertising startup, AdMob (Google is gobbling everything up: Blogger, YouTube, AdMob, Picasa, On2, reCaptcha, Gizmo5, and a slew of others).
• Digital Distractions – How many of these apply to you?
• Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index – Rupert Murdoch may remove News Corporation sites from Google’s index.

Talk about a nail in the coffin: Comscore has declared an 80/20 rule on online ads, with an updated study reporting that only 16% of users click on ad banners. Worse, the study says half of that population accounts for a staggering 85% of ad clicks.

Study author Linda Anderson is right when she notes, “Marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84% of Internet users who don’t click on an ad. …” Clickthroughs no longer reflect whether a run of ads is successful. Integrated campaigns are a must, and banners should be assumed as valueless in terms of driving traffic.

What do ads do, then? Done well, they can create context, awareness and recall. See enough Sony Cyber-shot ads and consumers will remember that Cyber-shot is a brand name with immediacy and relevance.
But the users seeing them won’t be clicking on those ads, no matter how large they get. Nowadays, that’s what search and social media are for.