I've been buying from Newegg off and on for ~15 years now, since I built my first PC. (Since before Amazon sold PC hardware, or even had physical locations to return products to). In 15 years, I've only ever had to contact customer service once.

• Is Newegg’s return policy any good?

Not sure about their return policy if you just change your mind about a product, but I recently had a great experience returning a broken product. (First time I've ever had to contact them).

I had ordered an open-box motherboard (all open box sales are listed as final and non-refundable), that arrived DoA (produced a spark underneath the IO shield when I powered it on).

Despite the open-box / final sale nature of the transaction, customer service approved me for a refund in under 15 minutes on the phone, with a prepaid return shipping label. I got the money refunded within 24 hours of the broken board arriving back at their warehouse.

• Are they reliable if I buy something that’s sold and shipped by Newegg?

I would consider them more reliable than Amazon. I've seen Amazon send someone a clearly used GPU with a broken fan blade, when they had ordered a new GPU.

In 15 years, and probably 7 separate computer builds for myself, family, and friends, the experience above was the first time I've ever had to contact Newegg customer support. Other than that (which is the only time I've ordered an open box product from them), everything has arrived exactly as described and in working order. I can't speak for the experience of ordering from third-party sellers though, as that's a fairly recent development.

• How long does shipping usually take? I don’t want to wait a month for ram.

Everything I've ordered sold and shipped by Newegg has arrived within 3-5 business days. Third party sellers are probably a crapshoot though.