Newegg Speaks Geek

THOSE OF US WHO SEND up a flare for the help desk when our computers develop hiccups may never have heard of Newegg.com. But it’s a fast-rising retail star among that portion of the population which isn’t afraid to tinker under the hoods of their PCs, and one of the biggest online outlets for sales of components from some very major high-tech manufacturers such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

That’s because when Newegg was hatched, back in the dot-com drought of 2001, it offered computer do-it-yourselfers three things they hadn’t gotten from an online component vendor before: wide selection, good prices and truly excellent customer service. Vice president Howard Tong assisted founder Fred Chang in conceiving and building the online store as a subsidiary of ABS Computer Technologies. He says launching an e-commerce company at the height of the Internet implosion might not have been such a bad thing.