Tamara and I have gotten in to the retail game online – we are about to launch a new online store – Doc5.com – and have been selling on Ebay for quite some time with a 100% satisfaction rating.
So we have been looking at wholesalers for suppliers, and one of our first was evertek. Evertek is “the World’s largest excess Computer Distributor, closeout Computer Wholesaler, clearance Computer Supplier, and closeout Electronics Wholesaler. ” And that is all fine and well, except that, like all other businesses, you have to provide quality to service to your customers in additional to whatever else you are.
In our case, with Evertek, I think it is fair to say that we did not receive quality service. We decided to make one modest order from them for a test run. After investing all of the time it takes to become authorized to buy from them we made an order that was just over the minimum.
We patiently waited for our order to show up, and when it finally did, they had sent us the wrong hard drives. We ordered IDE and got SATA. The ATA drives were not going to work in the project that we currently are working on so we spent more time, got a RMA number and sent them back. Meanwhile evertek was sending out replacement drives.
When they arrived in a few days, guess what? Yes, the replacement drives were also wrong. I looked at the original order – yep I asked for IDE drives, I looked at the original invoice, and of course it had IDE drives on it – not my fault.
So I called evertek and got passed around from one employee that did not want to deal with the problem to the next employee that did not want to deal with it either until we eventually, inevitably, ended up at someone’s voice mail.
As this was obviously un-acceptable we continued to try and get a refund, but were summarily told that even if this was completely Evertek’s fault they were not going to give us a refund, but we could send back the ( 2nd ) wrond hard drives and exchange them for store credit! Store credit – that is only good if we are shipped the correct items from the store.
So I eventually decided to chalk this one up to experience and to just keep the ( wrong ) hardware they sent us so that I never had to deal with that company again. This is obviously just one guy’s experience with this company – but this one experience has made it damn sure that I will not deal with this company – or the other sites affiliated with evertek – again.
So, did you ever find a better company? I have been thinking about doing business with Evertek but if you could recommend another company that I can reasearch…
thanks, Molly
April 10th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Hey Molly –
This experience really turned us off from the whole idea to be honest.
April 14th, 2006 at 10:08 am
We have never had a problem with them, they always provide a quality product in a timely manner. Sucks that you had an issue. You should try again, I make good money selling parts from them….
May 31st, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Sheila,
Is yor uncle working at Evertek or is he the owner?
June 23rd, 2006 at 2:50 am
evertek does have a habit of mixing up orders but most of the time it will be to your advantage. They can give you 100 2 GB DDR when you ordered 100 256MB DDR…happened to me couple of times…
May 4th, 2009 at 6:55 am
Evertek is like a wholesale Big Lots. We once bought some external A Power usb drive enclosures. These Apower drive cases had a weird cable socket, the cables included were standard usb mini cables, wouldn’t fit which is why they had them in the first place, wouldn’t take them back and didn’t have any cables for them. That was our last purchase. Evertek also owns Geeks.com and dump the junk on Evertek.
November 6th, 2009 at 2:33 am
If Evertek sent you the wrong product twice, that means they received the product incorrectly on the inventory shelf. One time I ordered some pc case holders, but they kept sending me monitor holders. They finally sorted it out, but it took about two weeks to get it right. Sometimes when you buy from China, similar looking stock will get mixed together in the case.
Unless you have an inspection agent in China that will audit the package contents for you, you need a Evertek employee to perform quality inspection as well. But that costs more, so you should take care of this in China if possible.
When you don’t perform quality control, the end consumer ends up suffering. I don’t know why companies don’t invest just a few pennies (chalk it up to marketing) and have happier customers as a result.
May 5th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
I’m not in the US but my company buys a lot of stuff from Evertek and always find them to be really good.
Sure, stuff goes wrong from time to time but our experiences are overwhelmingly positive.
For the record, I’m not affiliated in any way with Evertek but just thought I’d post here to say that they’re not all bad
July 13th, 2010 at 5:36 am