Newegg apologises for well-documented customer service fail, says it has enacted better policies

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The hardware retailer chalks issues up to "unintentional process errors" and says they were "isolated incidents".

Newegg has apologised for dealing poorly with returns and open-box product sales, in the wake of a recent video from Gamers Nexus documenting its own terrible returns experience. The online retailer has now said it has now put in place new policies to ensure a hassle-free return experience on open-box products for motherboards and CPUs, though is light on the details.

There's no doubt that the statement tweeted out by the company comes as a response to Gamers Nexus' recent videos outlining the channel's return experience for a Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme Z490 motherboard, which when combined total nearly two million views.

It goes something like this: The hardware YouTube channel bought a motherboard via Newegg for testing, though shortly thereafter decided it was no longer required. It then sought to return the motherboard under Newegg's returns policy and shipped the product back to the retailer.

That's where things get a little dicey for Newegg's customer service, as the return was shortly thereafter denied, claiming the product was damaged.

Newegg eventually refunded the channel and returned the motherboard, though only after being called out on Twitter—not exactly a valid course of action for every customer.

As it turns out, the motherboard was an open-box product, meaning it had already been opened prior to being sent out to Gamers Nexus. That also explains the damage, which as shown in a more recent video was spectacularly bad—like bent pins in the socket bad.

Worst still, it turns out the product still had a sticker attached to it from a recent RMA between Newegg and Gigabyte, the board's OEM, from when it had been sent for repair prior to Gamers Nexus receiving it. Following up on the information on this sticker and from talking direct to a Gigabyte customer service rep, Gamers Nexus discovered that the Newegg had rejected the cost to repair ($100) and instead had the item returned to them broken. From there, it was sold on to Gamers Nexus.

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Clearly, Newegg's return process failed catastrophically in this instance. Both in reselling a broken product and taking money from a customer for a broken product and then denying repair. Though I think why this issue has resonated so much with wider hardware enthusiasts is that there's a real question as to what a regular customer could do in this situation. You know, if you don't have 1.58M subscribers on YouTube.

It's not a good look, and Newegg's response is notably lacking any specifics regarding the event and what led to it. One can only hope the changes in policy enacted as a result will fix further instances of this sort, but I think that's a rather rosy outlook to have. Clearly some customers are being let down, and it shouldn't be necessary to make a public call-out to incite change, as was the case here.

Jacob Ridley
Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.