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Negative Suck Blog

For the most part, buying things on the Web sucks a lot of poop. Web sites are broken, slow, painful... Customer service is slow, clueless, ineffective... etc. Well, bevlieve it or not I've had some good experiences, so here are the places I'd recommend.

• 6) The folks at NextWarehouse.com didn't laugh (in my presence) when I had to return memory I ordered that was incompatible with my machine, and the RMA process was quick and easy. They were always available on the phone when I called, no run-arounds.
• 5) Amazon, while perhaps using slave labor, and abusing the patent process, does have a great check out process. (But I'm never going to use them again because of the patent stuff.)
• 4) Directron for PC computer parts. Although, I've never returned anything so I don't know how well that works.
• 3) New Egg was pretty great; decent prices and the customer service was fine when I had to return something.
• 2) ShareIt!, even though they have a stupid exclamation point as part of their name, haven't actually sucked when it came to customer service. Although, their credit card billing was rather sketchy. They claimed to have sent me the registration info, after charging my credit card, but I never got that email. I sent them a question about it and they quickly replied (within a day) so that was really good. They resent the registration info, which again never got to me. So I asked them to email it to me directly (although it was all supposedly going to the same email address) and they were willing to do that (presumably because the email address was the same) and did. So I did get my registration info in the end. But I'd guess that there is something broken on their end where they think they sent out the info, but it didn't really go anwyhere... So they suck for all that, but at least they worked with me.
• 1) You may not believe this, but when my experience checking out at kbtoys pretty much did not suck. They had lots of nice explanatory text, they'd tell you ahead of time what a button would do, they'd tell you registration wasn't required, etc. They have pretty much done it right, as far as I can tell from one purchase. Heck, I gotta go buy some stock in those folks! Update: With the exception of having the stupid "click only once or we'll charge you over and over." Damn. So near yet so far away...