Finding a good online retailer that has good pricing, great shipping, and even better customer service has been an eight year process for me. I’ve bought from NewEgg several times in the past, and they have rarely failed to impress. Until now.

I recently purchased a few items as part of my evil plan to stay one step ahead of the world (I’ll detail what that is at a much later date).

Today, I received this notice from NewEgg:

We are sorry to inform you the following items are back ordered:

Item #:17-131-163(DVD+R DL VERBATIM 95166 8X 10PK RT) Quantity:1

Deduct Soamount:24.99 (USD)
Deduct shipping charge:4.50 (USD)
Total deduct amount:29.49 (USD)

Back orders are usually caused by Inaccurate inventories: with thousands of individual parts, it is possible some inventory counts may be inaccurate. Also, the accuracy may be correct but our warehouse reports we cannot ship the last one or two items due to being damaged on the shelf.

To speedup your order process, we have removed these items from your order. Newegg does not accept any back orders. All back ordered items are refunded in full and will not be shipped. Your account has been credited full, including shipping, for all these deleted items.

We would like to suggest you go back to our website and place your email address on our Auto Notify listing. Once we do get more in stock an email notification will be sent to you.

Please allow 3-4 working days for this credit to show up with your Bank.

This order will be shipped, without back ordered items, in about 24-48 hours, except weekends. All deleted items will not be shipped.

thank you for your patience,

Customer Service
NewEgg.com

Did you pay attention there? One of the items I purchased, the Verbatim DVD+DL pack is out of stock according to this notice. Check the link I provided again. At the time of this writing, that item is indeed in stock. The email was dated 5 hours prior to my writing this. Why didn’t they just wait?? Now I have to purchase the items again and wait again.

After logging in, I found the correspondence according to NewEgg:

Item #:17-131-163(DVD+R DL VERBATIM 95166 8X 10PK RT) Quantity:1 Deduct Soamount:24.99 (USD) Deduct shipping charge:4.50 (USD) Total deduct amount:29.49 (USD) deleted B/O by Rodney A Newsom 3/29/2006 11:53:19 AM

Also, at the bottom of the notice, you may see that it says that the rest of my initial order will be shipped in about 1-2 business days. I checked the order status and found that the remaining order was shipped on “3/29/2006 12:28:37 PM,” so one of the two are lying. I still have not received a tracking number.

Something is afoot at the Circle-K!