A little context before we begin the story…
MegaBuy is a technology online retailer that also has some storefronts here in Queensland. They have quite a lot of refurbished and brand-new devices, parts and consumables.
I have been using them for some time and this latest experience comes from sourcing an 10th Generation Intel “Frost Canyon” NUC for use with a Hackintosh project.
I had been itching to switch to Mac OS for my business office duties and leaving my Windows setup for gaming and game development rather than mixing both gaming/game development and office work together.
The Setup
To keep things short, I knew I had some credit from existing orders that I had saved in their system. I originally wanted to gun for a Core i5 NUC but unfortunately, they were out of stock. I had to choose a 10th generation NUC as Mac OS does not support the newer 11/12-th generation NUCs due to the Intel EVO architecture design. Of course, there’s work arounds for that, but they’re tedious and I wanted to take the easy route.
So, I opted for a NUC with a i3-10100U processor. After digging around, I found one and ordered it on Wednesday last week. I selected the required option if you’ve got credit to apply to the order.
I shot them a ticket and said, “Could you please apply the credit on invoices X, Y and Z to this order”. That was late Friday last week and I got a ticket saying they had received it and it’s been looked at.
Cool, I thought. The weekend came and went. They aren’t open on the weekend, so I took my mind off it and focused on something else, like setting up the OpenCore bootloader.
Monday came and it wasn’t until just after lunch that MegaBuy shot back a response saying they’ve applied the credit and told me the Remainer that I had to pay. I paid the amount and sent them a screenshot. They marked it as payment received and moved it over to Accounts.
You want what now?
I didn’t receive any update until wednesday this week that one of the Customer Service team members shot me a reply saying that they needed an extra amount of $72.15 to process the order.
A little stunned, I asked why. Apparently during the time MegaBuy was busy and didn’t respond, Intel had jacked up their pricing and the pricing from the original invoice “was no longer valid” and they (MegaBuy) had “tried to get the best discount” possible.
At this point my patience was running thin and holding my tongue to avoid lashing out and telling them to suck it and eat the $72.15 price difference, I shot back a response.
The response simply stated that I’ll continue with the order and after doing the bank transfer, I sent them a reply showing them the bank receipt.
On the same email, I did mention that this delay was disappointing, and I was hoping to have this NUC by end of the week. They shot back a generic “we’ll ship it as soon as possible” response to that dot point.
The Mystery Packages
Jumping ahead to Thursday and having heard no information about the order being shipped, I was about to give up on getting it up and running this weekend. However, it wasn’t until I got a ping from AusPost on my phone that I had two parcels set to be delivered tomorrow. Where these the packages from Megabuy?
It is now Friday and I’m having lunch with the two parcels acquired. I’ll have to head home before I can unbox them, but I’m pretty sure they’re the packages I’ve been waiting for. They better be.
Afterthoughts
Maybe the RNG goddess blessed my luck and I got lucky. Or maybe the emails I sent conveyed I was annoyed and MegaBuy thought “Shit, we better get this to him or he’s gonna vent at us”.
I honestly don’t know why they couldn’t eat the $72.15 price difference. I had already settled the invoice and paid the original amount. Granted, I know that price hikes happen and I’m not trying to be a cheapskate, but seriously…
Maybe I should’ve popped the white flag and cancel my order instead. I’m too tired for this crap.