So...
I bought an Asus branded NVidia card through Newegg, that I would have bought anyway. It's a low end card, about $40, and had a $10.00 rebate.
To get the rebate, one has to select it, with a poor search function, from over 100 items, and do various and sundry things, including cutting the barcode off the box and taping, not stapling, it to the form. I get it. The whole idea of these rebates is to make it annoying enough so that people don't ask for them. Then, to add a bit of insult, they offer (remember, this is ten dollars that we're discussing) quicker turn around if you pay some money, I've forgotten how much, maybe $2.00, maybe even $5.00.
So, after going through all this, several weeks later, I get an email that my rebate is turned down. This may have been partially my fault. Newegg, despite its annoying pause (frequently hanging, sometimes resulting in double billing, from what I've seen on the Internet), thing where your card is verified, used my shipping address as my billing address. When I filled out the rebate, I don't remember if there were any warnings, but I put in the actual billing address which is my home address. Whether or not the rebate said MUST MATCH what is on invoice, or whether I even thought about that part, I don't remember. So, it may have been my error, and seeing how difficult they were making it, I should have realized it.
At any rate, they say, however, through the vendor, you can do it again They then give a link, say you should click on rebate status and reprint and resubmit. However, the original form gives no place to fix the address, and, in addition, says that one must attach the bar code from the package, which of course, I don't have.
So, tomorrow, I may call them and see if they can walk me through another way to get it--at this point, it's already cost me more than $10.00 in time. But, my thought, and this is where I wonder if I'm wrong---I've decided, due to this, to buy no more Asus products. I've bought their monitors, netbooks, and ultrabooks--all in all, spent well over $1,000 on Asus products. However, this $10.00 they've gained has lost me as a customer. So, if they were Apple, which has its locked in fan base, or a US phone or cable company, where there is no real competition, it doesn't matter to them if I like it or not.
However, Asus is in competition. I thought the old adage is that it's easier to keep a customer than get a new one. Isn't this a rather foolish business decision on their part, to aggravate someone who can, by word of mouth, help their product or hurt it? In addition, I'm in a senior enough position so that if I say don't buy Asus, it will be considered. As I'm old, I probably won't buy that much more, but I would say this $10 has probably cost them at least a few hundred when I next look for monitors or laptops or my company does the same, even if it was my fault--at least partially. I do wonder, if I'd put the billing address to match the invoice, if I would have gotten the same notice, saying this does not match the billing address on the credit card.
Anyway, nice move Asus. You did save $10.00. But the attitude is perhaps what bothers me most--I understand that companies look for an edge, and I'm not even sure any of them care about their customers anymore unless they're a smaller business, but this one just seems a bit sleezy, and there is plenty of competition for the products.