EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: blueskull on November 28, 2016, 04:22:01 am
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So, I bought a new laptop to replace my old ultrabook for work, and I found an interesting thing on pricing.
For the same configuration (-041), the same laptop sells at $1599 on NewEgg's own webstore, while it is only $1449 on NewEgg's eBay store.
So why would NewEgg sell at 10% more price on their own platform? AFAIK eBay has 10% processing fee, that means NewEgg is actually getting 20% less for selling on eBay at 10% less price, so why?
I would understand if NewEgg sell things on eBay or Amazon for 10% more price, but 10% less? It's really hard to understand.
BTW, NewEgg's website sucks. Some evil stuck JS loop hangs my FireFox all the time.
My theory is they deliberately price one higher, so to attract people to buy the lower one, rather then buying no one. However, if I am to do this, I will price on my own webstore lower, and price on eBay higher.
Also, NewEgg really doesn't have to do this since this particular model (GS63VR-Pro-041) is only carried by NewEgg if we only count big, chain distributors such as BestBuy, NewEgg, NCIX or Amazon.
So, why would they do that?
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Trying to game eBay search algorithm to get more sales. It gives priority to higher discounted items if sorted by relevancy. Many sellers do this.
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Also adding MSI's brand value, I don't think the cost of this machine to NewEgg will be lower than $1250.
This may not be the case. If they move a lot of them, then the price can be much lower.
So, how can NewEgg even make profit
They don't necessarily need to make profit. They may just need to free up shelves and clear the books for the next accounting cycle.
and still offer free shipping?
They ship a lot, they get good rates from shipping companies.
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I believe Ebay and Paypal also negotiate significantly discounted rates for large customers too. Ebay Stores generally pay a monthly fee and then have lower final value fees. I know that without an Ebay store, the final value and paypal fee are around 13.3% IIRC.
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Yes, a large eBay store is not paying anywhere near the fees you would pay as an individual seller. How much is Newegg charging for shipping on the eBay item vs the one on their site? A lot of Newegg items on their site have free or rather low shipping costs, which of course Newegg is not eating, it's built in to the item price. For eBay items they may charge actual market rate shipping.
As for the site, I've been a Newegg customer for a dozen years at least now, never had a problem. But Firefox and it's bloated mess is about the LAST browser I would ever use. ;D It started out awesome but it seems they never learned from the past and it has grown every bit as bloated as the old Netscape Navigator got. So they spn off a side project with a lightweight version and..it too is gradually bloating up. Sort of a pet peeve of mine, the general attitude among large software developers seems to be screw it, everyone has 32GB RAM and 1TB+ storage, and they all have 4 core processors where each core is more powerful than the sum total of all computers in existence 10 years ago, so who needs efficiency, ship fast, keep adding features no one wants, and make it bigger. Bigger! I know that's not EVERYONE but it is the general trend. When you have to make something do useful tasks with only 1K of RAM or less, you learn efficiency. I guess that's why I like 8 bit micros. They are more than fast enough for most tasks, but the limited program space and RAM mean they lack the resources for the sloppy programming style so often seen these days.
Anyway, sorry OT, at least my first paragraph was on :-DD
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Firefox was broken AF for several years when Flash plugin was consuming 2GB even when not in use after watching something. Firefox recently had an issue writing a huge amount of data to the hard disk, even when idle, which is something that scares SSD users (even though endurance is so good now).
Edge has some good parts but that too has got slower since Windows 10 first released.
However with Chrome you need quite a lot of RAM if you want to hold many tabs open but I've not noticed any real slowdown in the 4 years of using my Samsung 830 SSD (launching). If anything web pages are the area that had caused slowdown and bloat since.
As far as eBay pricing, I'm pretty sure they're dropping their costs so sellers are able to deep discount more.
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As for Chrome and memory - no kidding! I have TWO tabs open - GMail and the forum, yet there are SEVEN Chrome processes running, consuming nearly 300MB RAM.
WTAF?
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I'm not worried so much as surprised - well, that's the wrong word, I've known for a long time the Chrome used a lot of memory. I have 16GB in this laptop (most it can take) and even with a whole bunch of other stuff open, I'm still using less than 4GB of it. Though Chrome has grown significantly since my previous post - all i did is read more posts here and write a couple.
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As for Chrome and memory - no kidding! I have TWO tabs open - GMail and the forum, yet there are SEVEN Chrome processes running, consuming nearly 300MB RAM.
I'm seeing the same thing on my system. They advertise Chrome as a light browser...compared to what. It's really kind of a pig. I also notice it slows down a lot if I go too long without clearing the file cache. I was thinking of trying Firefox, but it sounds like it's got its share of problems too.
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FF 50.0 here, using 3G of VM and 1.3G of RAM, with a load of tabs open. Noscript and Requestpolicy helps a lot for the resource use, as you do not need to run all the scripting for many pages.
My first use of Mozilla was on a system with a 66Mhz slot1 Pentium, with a whole 32M of memory. It was fine there, and ran well, though it was also running on RH4, so I could also leave it running for weeks at a time with no issues.