Problems likely a temporary glitch.
Suddenly I can access anything on the Newegg site with no problems. It appears likely that cman and the two posts that preceeded his may be correct about the source of the problem. Now that it is only us late nighters, the access problem has cleared up.
It does not bode well for Newegg that their current management, and their access providers, apparently had no plans in place for an event that enthusiasts were well aware of, and looking forward to. I would suspect that they lost sales, not only due to the average customer 's total frustration with the site, but also to impatient enthusiasts who quickly went elsewhere and will stay there. Not good performance in this day and age.
In response to the person who said this is not a "new site" issue, I typed 'newegg.com' in my address bar and was greeted with an announcement touting a new home page, and an invitation to answer a questionnaire. I think that Newegg has recently made so called "enhancements" to the site that have made it progressively less usable. Newegg is still a bit easier to use than Tiger Direct or ZipZoomFly, but seems to get a little less so after each "upgrade".
Hence my comment questioning whether the people responsible for these dubious upgrades might be outside companies that have no clue about what has made Newegg such a successful e-commerce company.
Finding items that meet a specific spec seems to be extremely cumbersome and tedious now. If you want an example you can try for yourself, run a search using the current left panel categories for an AM2 Heat sink/Fan. Should be pretty simple. This is my experience:
- After clicking Computer Hardware/Fans & Heatsinks/CPU Fans and Heatsinks (3 clicks) I reach the main page for these products
- The left column does not initially show AM2, so I have to click 'more'
- I initially see AM2 down the expanded list, but there are only 8 items. Some users might have actually assumed that this was it for AM2 Heatsink /Fans, but that did not seem right for the new standard AMD socket.
- I looked further down the column and found AM2 references, in conjunction with other socket compatibilities in 7 or 8 places where AM2 compatibility was listed in conjunction with other sockets.
- There are another 50+ AM2 heatsink/coolers noted somewhere in this somewhat randomly structured list
- It appears that I have to access 8 or more web pages sequentially to see all of products that match my need
- Each time I go back to the original page, I must click 'more' again to be able to view the AM2 compatible items in this mess
I think this is a totally backwards structure:
- What I am looking for (AM2 Compatible Heatsink/Fans) is the superset; i.e. what is important to me during this shopping session.
- Any other socket compatibilities might be interesting, but are secondary.
- Why not organize the left panel alphabetically by individual socket type (or put the most recent such as AM2/939 first for AMD, and put older socket types under 'more', if you must use a 'more' function) . Other compatibilities should be picked up in the individual product spec summaries and pages.
This is just one example. This kind of mess seems to have been proliferating as the site has been "upgraded". The whole drill down and planning structure that originally led me to choose Newegg as the best vendor for a computer hobbyist like me seems have been deteriorating at an alarming rate.
Regards
Barbicane