They got bought out, and the new owners do less of their own selling and more pass-through for shadier vendors as I understand it.

A decade ago.

A Chinese conglomerate bought a majority stake in 2016. They immediately started going downhill. Then in 2020 they merged with another Chinese company.

Newegg used to be good. I bought a lot from them, too. Even had a shirt. They haven’t been good for a while. I don’t know all the details.

Real ones — computer builders, I mean — would just use PCPartPicker and buy from whoever had the best prices. Even if you didn’t need their tools to tell you what was compatible with what, the site was fun and free and it saved you money. Used to be, Newegg had the best prices, but they started getting undercut by Amazon and others. But there was some other drama with them, too.

I've bought some of those, knowing they were potentially sketchy, for applications that don't matter (like NintendoDS flash carts, or Raspberry Pi projects) and I've mostly been impressed with them. They have worked, and had most/all of their listed capacity at most of their advertised read/write speed.

Then again, I was only buying low-capacity ones, like 16-32GB max, and haven't used any for many write cycles, so idk if they hold up.

But it was worth it, for me, to get a steep discount on chips for tinkering projects.

But for my 1TB chip for my Deck, I went through the verification process with the manufacturer to confirm it was a legit chip while it was still in the return window!

Scoundrels!

Never thought about it in these terms, thanks.