Newegg’s Missing Feature
Here’s something I’d love to get from Newegg as a Christmas present to all of geekdom: the ability for users to submit a custom-built system as a product, which can then be reviewed, commented on, and bought by others as a single unit. Wouldn’t that be cool? You build your system there, and submit all the parts (sold by Newegg of course) as the package. People can review it normally, just like any other products, and post issues and real-world benchmarks for the systems as comments. Good custom builds would quickly float to the top. Incompatibilities would be washed out immediately.
As a time-constrained geek, I’d be able to log in, look at the top-rated custom builds, and click “Buy” to get the whole thing. No clicking around. Novices would buy knowing the system has been tested out by many others. Any issues would have solutions posted as comments. Newegg would sell more and build even more value into their site.
Do any hardware sites do this? Am I missing something obvious? If not, then, pretty please, Newegg?
December 13, 2008 at 12:04 am | Filed Under Sysadmin
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14 Responses to “Newegg’s Missing Feature”
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+1 Great idea! Why hasn’t anybody else thought of something like that?
Great idea for sure. They have something close(ish) w/ the saved, public Wish Lists. So it would presumably be a simple mod of that system (mostly frontend work) to make it happen.
Brad’s right – they already have most of this w/ the wishlists. The only thing they lack is the ability to comment on *your* specific build.
That would be great.
Newegg would not have to host it for us. For example, The Tech Report creates a system:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15941/8
and adds an affiliate link to buy the system on Newegg:
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/Shopping/AddToCart.asp?Submit=ADD&ItemList=N82E16819115202,N82E16813128362,N82E16820148246,N82E16814500068,N82E16822136319%7C2,N82E16827151173,N82E16829132006,N82E16817341011,N82E16811129025&nm_mc=OTC-TechReport&cm_mmc=OTC-TechReport-_-NA-_-NA-_-NA
Really good idea!
I think would be a nice feature to be able to “copy” a design so you can easily make some small modifications (add more disks, large monitor, tv-card, etc.) and not have to start from scratch when you put together a whole new computer.
Guess the problem will be that people who build their own computers often want the latest parts, which would make the complete designs rather short lived.
I’m glad you guys think this is reasonable. I think it’d be a pretty cool feature, so I’m in the same boat as mbhinder, why haven’t they done it?
Thanks for the mention of the Newegg public wish lists. It’s true that they’re almost there with regards to ability to rate and add to cart as a unit. But as Brad mentions, there’s some front end work that would need to happen. The public wishlists are pretty hidden from view, doesn’t seem like they’ve put a lot of emphasis on them.
Namely, they’d need a more prominent place on the site, ability to sort by best selling/rating, good descriptions, focus on complete systems, that kind of thing. It sounds like they half-did the feature, without giving it the time of day. As it stands they’re so hidden from view, it’s no wonder we have a wasteland of zero-comments, zero-ratings mish mash lists.
Ken is right, we don’t really depend on Newegg. In fact, if a hardware fan site did it, and maybe built the shopping lists dynamically off of different vendors (including an optimized list with best prices for each part), that’d be great. Maybe even a dedicated site to ‘social’ system building.
@CM: good point, but you could always add to cart and then tweak the system, then submit your order as a different complete system. Regarding the useful life, again true that it is short, but I guess lately it’s been a few months.
Cheers you all, Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or Winter Solstice or any old reason you have to hang out with the people you love and do what really matters.
I like this idea in theory, but it would fail in practice. Most of the feedback on individual items is pretty poor IMHO and the “flavor of the week” items seem to be highly rated. I feel the pain too since researching the parts for a new system requires time I no longer had (it was a ton of fun in college). I’ve resigned myself to basing my builds on Ars Technica’s system guides. http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200809.ars is the most recent one.
Great idea.
I agree with Ken Roberts — we don’t have to wait for Newegg to do this for us.
You can already do “community reviewed systems” on the Computer Component wiki http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/ComputerComponent/CommunityReviewedSystem .
What else do we need to add to get single click “Put all the parts for the top-rated custom-built system in my shopping cart”?
@David: I guess an unique identifier for the parts, so that we could crank out or re-use a little engine to calculate the prices and build a cart.
Yes – it should be a pre-assembled shopping cart and should be tied in with an affiliate program such that I could have an entry on my blog about a new system, offer a link (somewhat like amazon’s setup) and if you click it, you are sent to newegg with a populated shopping cart. That way, you could delete an ATI video card and add your favorite Nvidia card, or whatever tweaks you wanted.
Guess we should send these suggestions to them instead of just talking about it here!
@Quake: absolutely. I wanted to get a few comments here, see if you guys thought this was sane, and then I’m sending it to them (here’s an idea, there are some comments, you guys should do it before someone else does).
From my POV of course, a ‘social system building’ site independent of any vendor would be the top choice, but a new egg one would work.
Newegg always has the best deals on computer products. You can always find amazing Newegg coupons online!
Sounds a lot like Digikey with BOM lists able to be bought in a single sale.
I’ve been working on a site that could be what you guys are sorta talking about.
I’m looking for people to use the tool and let me know how they feel about it. whats missing? how to improve it.
Check out : http://www.slickbuilds.com
thanks..
welcome all feedback