Including Everything Blog

Posts Tagged ‘amazon’

Few companies take the time to monitor and review their reputation online and actually respond to the complaints and praises their consumers put out there. They responded within 48 hours of the posting online and handled it beautifully.

I rip on Rackspace specifically because I genuinely care for the brand. If I didn’t care, I would leave and find another vendor. I can think of few companies better-poised to take on the challenge of cloud computing better than Rackspace.

In fact, maybe this is where the disconnect is for consumers right now. Not just with Rackspace, but with all vendors claiming to operate their business on cloud architecture. We call it many things, but the common term is “cloud computing”. Are the public’s assumptions in flawless uptime incorrect in that it’s a “distributed processing” model instead.

Cloud technology has already proven itself as a good model for handling larger scale processing for people that need it. Companies like Slicehost (now owned by Rackspace) and Rackspace’s new Cloud Servers platform based on Slicehost’s backend are perfect for this need and you can scale up as needed within minutes. This was only a dream a couple of years ago.

That said, is the public incorrect in equating services like Cloud Sites to Rackspace’s multi-rack load balancing solutions? Such a solution still has a point of failure, although small. The chances of an outage under such a system with two high end servers, each in separate racks with a load balancer in place are incredibly low, in fact, near non-existent. We haven’t seen stability like that on any level with Mosso, Amazon S3 or Media Temple the best of my recollection.

Newegg, Inc. has a new (new to me, anyways) area called Newegg Mall that sells things non-tech.  It’s almost Amazon or Buy.com like.  I purchased a Bulova watch from Newegg Mall out of curiosity the other day and it was received very quickly.  I paid for rush shipping, but Newegg still processed the order same day, even though I had an issue with my shipping address not being on file correctly with American Express.  I resolved the issue with American Express in the morning Tuesday, and Newegg still processed the order on Tuesday with time to have the order ship for receipt on Thursday.  Not bad!

I noticed through correspondence that it was Newegg that placed the order, but the fullfillment was actually through World of  Watches.  It’s interesting to see how they’re leveraging third parties to handle the completion of the orders and expanding their inventory in the process.  Amazon pioneered this model years ago and it seems other companies are following this business model today.  If it works, why deviate, right?

The pricing was the bottom line.  I received a $595 watch for $100.  When taken to the local Fred Meyer jewler to have it sized, I was told that no jewler in the area could possibly have done better in their pricing and that the watch I received was “among the best”.

What’s even more impressive is that Newegg’s re-sold rate for the watch that Word of Watches was fullfilling from its inventory was better than the pricing on World of Watches’ own website.  You can’t beat that!

I would rate their service level at Newegg Mall a 9/10 simple because of their call center having to dispatch my request or call to a customer service rep when I call in, then the rep calls me back.  They’re quick to call back, but it would be less irritating and tedious if I were able to reach a customer service representative at the time of calling in the first time.

Check out Newegg Mall today.  They rival companies like Overstock.com, Buy.com and Amazon.com and were polite when contacted for customer service.