an idea on how to stop the shorages on alot of tech products

[ethannim]

I think stores and companys should create a virtual line where every few hours you need to complete a captcha. 

[WhitetailAni]

Just now, ethannim said:

I think stores and companys should create a virtual line where every few hours you need to complete a captcha. 

Like what EVGA is doing?

 

elephants

[minibois]

Just invite all people who ordered a product out to a Ninja Warrior like competition, where they must traverse an obstacle course.

Winner takes all videocards and gets to share them across whomever they see fit.

 

Or maybe people should just have patience and order a card they want, it may be in stock some day.

[Vishera]

Stores should set limits:

1 unit per IP address,Credit card number,shipping address,

Captchas are outdated since every bot with deep learning capabilities can learn to solve them,

We need a more sophisticated solution,such as Epic Games' find the mouse game,yeah it's annoying that you need to play a game to verify that you are a human but at least it works.

[mariushm]

A simple solution : only allow these items to be ordered by people who previously ordered other components in the past, at least 1-2 months previously.

This way,  you prevent new accounts including bots from ordering the components.

Yeah, i suppose someone could buy another person's account and order things so this is some basic stuff.

 

Some other ideas ... everyone who wants to order a 3060 card (or another model) , must preorder and pay a non refundable 10$ fee or something like that - store can send some mousepad or something or a $10 off next order coupon after user buys a card or give 10$ off at purchase - this way you have the credit card information and that person can't order multiple items.

 

After that $10 payment is payed, email user and send him/her to a page and show him the list of 3060 models available (incoming, shipment expected) and let him select which models he's interested to buy and sort them in the order he'd prefer (for example say  i'd prefer this evga model the most,  then this gigabyte model , then this asus model, if nothing else this asrock)

 

When part comes in stock,  everyone that paid that $10 can get an email, a text on their phones if they opted to give their phone and maybe even an automated call and basically say "You have 4-6 hours to go on store page and confirm you accept the card available and pay for it, or refuse it and wait for a new shipment to get another model you prefer" 

IF the person doesn't do anything within that time, this reserved card goes back in queue and another user that tried to preorder and had this model in his list of preferred cards is notified a card is available

 

 

In the world of VPNs and dedicated servers and VPSes costing even less than $10 (giving you dedicated IPs) rules like 1 per IP or 1 per account don't work. 

Same for physical address - i live in an apartment building - i can easily ask everyone in my apartment building to let me put their apt. number as address.... or i can use my parents' , my brother, my sister, my work address .. lots of addresses.

 

Credit card numbers are also easy to get ... there's services which give you virtual credit cards or create credit cards on demand for small fee (like 1-5$) so again can't track a person by that.

 

What can't be faked easily is previous behavior.

 

any reasonable store could figure from previous order history if the buyer is a regular home user buying personal computer, or maybe building occasionally computers to sell (low volume) or whatever ... saying you can't figure out someone buys 100 cards at a time is silly.

 

[kelvinhall05]

Just make more stuff, smh my head.

[unsorted]

Do retailers really care?

Maximum stock movement. Minimal work. Profit. Done.

 

Am I missing something? What incentive is there for them to spend money to change their e-commerce systems? Is there any incentive?

 

I'm thinking if I were in retail I'd love to move all the stock in just a few large orders, or even just one large order. Especially if I didn't charge for delivery. I'd be saving a packet.

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

produce more before launching / releasing a product? 

 

well, I totally agree with you there, that would be indeed a good solution! 

 

better communicating would go a long way too...  

 

 

6 minutes ago, unsorted said:

Do retailers really care?

Nope. and why should they... 

[Roswell]

I think a lot of you guys fail to realize that retailers don’t give two shits about who actually buys hardware. They’re making their money regardless. 
 

Implementing extra steps and verification would just cost the retailer extra time and money as well which makes little logistical sense.

[Yummychickenblue]

maybe we could have a system where people exchange things that they have like furniture or food for the products. Obviously the person that wants the product the most will be willing to put forward the most stuff

[Semper]

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Nope. and why should they... 

Retailers have a lot more reason to care than you might think.
Repeat customers are good for business. Part of having repeat customers is having stock of the item(s) they want. Repeat customers are much more likely to recommend a retail outlet to those that they know.
Customers being able to find things on your site and/or in-store drastically increases the likelihood that they will make additional item purchases in the same transaction, more revenue at POS, simply because they have stock.

These are just two examples off the top of the head of someone who has not, nor has any interesting in studying economics and/or marketing.

[Amias]

56 minutes ago, Semper said:

Retailers have a lot more reason to care than you might think.
Repeat customers are good for business. Part of having repeat customers is having stock of the item(s) they want. Repeat customers are much more likely to recommend a retail outlet to those that they know.
Customers being able to find things on your site and/or in-store drastically increases the likelihood that they will make additional item purchases in the same transaction, more revenue at POS, simply because they have stock.

Company's are stupid and in a pinch (looking around at the global pandemic) only care about their bottom line.

 

Besides the demand is so ridiculously high, even implementing a better system will still saturate out and leave their customers pissed off.

 

Right now everyone hates 'scalpers', these websites are too busy trying to secure instant selling stock than to fix people instantly buying them.

 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

If I had a dollar for every thread someone has made about how they can solve scalpers or complaining about scalpers, I would have enough money for a RTX 3080 at the price scalpers are charging. 

 

We've gone over this so many times, can we just keep it to one thread?

[Semper]

29 minutes ago, Amias said:

Company's are stupid and in a pinch (looking around at the global pandemic) only care about their bottom line.

 

Besides the demand is so ridiculously high, even implementing a better system will still saturate out and leave their customers pissed off.

 

Right now everyone hates 'scalpers', these websites are too busy trying to secure instant selling stock than to fix people instantly buying them.

 

Consider that it's a prominent issue currently, where it hasn't ever been on this scale previously. It's a cycle of circumstances that have created the 'perfect storm' so to speak.
I don't have a solution to stop the bots and scalpers, do you? I'm yet to see something that would be flawless in execution at preventing bots and scalping. I don't know how it can be done, but I do know It's not as simple as flipping a switch and *presto* problem gone. It may not be feasible for all, many, most, some (or any other volume) of these retailers to implement solutions to stop this from happening. EVGA has measures in place that are fairly robust to prevent this from happening. EVGA cards are still being bought and instantly flipped on ebay for a massive markup.

I don't like the scalping as much as anybody, but quite frankly, it's a free market. If someone is foolish enough and/or impatient enough to pay scalping prices, they've earned the right to be separated from their money. Launch-day stock being gone before John Doe is able to get one is nothing new, It's just so happens to be that it's happening on a much larger scale at the moment.

[Spindel]

If people stop being willing to paying what scalpers demand scalpers will lower their price or stop scalping.

 

It’s free market economy 101, when demand outstrips supply prices go up. 

[oldSock]

Scalpers exist because people are willing to pay to get their hands on the new stuff.

 

What can companies do about this? Simple compile stock and list it on a live counter. Meaning customers will be able to see when the item will be available. That means customers can calculate the cost and time it will take to get their hands on something. Also have a live list price meaning display the actual price of the product so that customers can actively see how much they stand to lose by paying the Scalpers.

 

But in reality if people are paying the Scalpers they are the problem not the Scalpers not the limited supply. In the end it is just a product that will last only for so long. If you get someone willing to part with their money "just because it is new and shiny" then there is a much much bigger problem to address and those people really need help. 

 

 

[bigmug]

The obvious and best solution is to stop using fixed prices. Make high-demand items sell at a price based on instantaneous demand (train tickets are often sold using this method in my country). You start at a prohibitively high price (for a 3080, maybe 10 000 USD), then over the course of a few hours, let the price drop until people start buying, which makes the price level out until demand drops again. If people coordinate themselves, they can defeat the mechanism by artificially waiting for much longer until they start buying, but such global coordination will not be possible, so the method is safe against that form of "attack".

The main problem with this method is that it slows and lowers total sales, so the stores and manufacturers have no incentive to implement it.
 

[Amias]

8 hours ago, Semper said:

I don't have a solution to stop the bots and scalpers, do you? I'm yet to see something that would be flawless in execution at preventing bots and scalping. I don't know how it can be done, but I do know It's not as simple as flipping a switch and *presto* problem gone. 

 

Actually it is. Current 3080 retails for $699. Change that to $999 ... or $1,200 ... or $1,500. Whatever meets the demand levels. 

 

Say you've sold 20,000 cards, sink that extra 6-12 million into better production throughput and capacity. Sell more.

 

My only problem with scalpers are that money isn't going back into Nvidia/ATi/Sony/Microsoft's pockets enabling them to do more and make more. They're leaving massive amounts of money on the shelf that could be used to make their next product better.

 

 

[mariushm]

15 minutes ago, Amias said:

 

Say you've sold 20,000 cards, sink that extra 6-12 million into better production throughput and capacity. Sell more.

 

It doesn't work like that.

TSMC and Samsung which silicon chips have a limited production capacity and don't make just the video card gpu chips. Now you have Apple M1 chip, you have other mobile phone chips, you have Ryzen processors, you have PS5 and you have Xbox all reserving capacity at factories - a company like TSMC or Samsung won't invest let's say 100 million dollars to increase capacity because it doesn't make sense. Half a year from now, Microsoft and Sony will decrease orders because people will buy consoles in lower volume, and then the company would end up with unused capacity and it costs tons of money to keep a silicon chip factory working, even if it's not making chips.

 

Then it's not only the actual gpu chip, it's also the memory chip manufacturers, which are just a bunch, 3-4 big manufacturers, and in case of nvidia I think only micron makes gddr6x - so if micron has a problem making chips, then nvidia can't sell video cards because it has to wait after micron to make gddr6x chips.

 

AMD and nvidia sell the gpu chip and the memory as a bundle, and often give each company a certain number of chips and often will put conditions like for every 1000  3080 chips, you have to take 3000 3070 chips and make 3000 3070 cards for which they have lower margins.

 

The profits of a video card maker are often less than 5-10%, on a  150-200$ card it's possible for the video card maker to make less than 5$ profit.

[Amias]

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The profits of a video card maker are often less than 5-10%, on a  150-200$ card it's possible for the video card maker to make less than 5$ profit.

 

... and that's how they ended up at $699 ...

 

Nvidia knows they can't satisfy demand with their supply, the worth of these cards has obviously been driven up by scarcity. They could add exactly however much extra they wanted to the card price and it would be pure profit.

 

[mariushm]

43 minutes ago, Amias said:

 

... and that's how they ended up at $699 ...

 

Nvidia knows they can't satisfy demand with their supply, the worth of these cards has obviously been driven up by scarcity. They could add exactly however much extra they wanted to the card price and it would be pure profit.

 

It's not (always) the company that makes the card (asus, asrock, gigabyte, xfx, sapphire etc), it's the importer of the cards, the distributor, the retail store adding markup...

In some places, the distributor or the importer has direct deals with mining companies or other interested parties and the cards don't even reach the couriers supposed to deliver them to physical stores.

[Monkey Dust]

1% chance that instead of the 3080 or 5600X that you ordered, you are delivered a hungry leopard. If you are only buying one, your odds of getting eaten are slim. But order 10 and you have a 9.6% chance of a horrifying death. Both discourages scalping and feeds some leopards.  

 

Less predator based solutions could be to push back launch until inventory has been built up, though that would incur storage costs and the consoles in particular will want to be out in time for Christmas. Or customers pay Nvidia/AMD/MS/Sony for a voucher to be able to purchase the product from a vendor. One voucher per address and credit/debit card, and in case of demand exceeding supply allocated on a lottery basis so bots can't gain an advantage. 

[Mark Kaine]

On 12/6/2020 at 5:59 PM, mariushm said:

It doesn't work like that

while it doesn't exactly work like that the poster wasn't completely wrong either, Nvidia already said they're moving to tsmc later because of higher capacities... 

 

 

this is basically a demo run / soft launch (without really explaining it) which of course leaves the customer confused and maybe even panicking. 

 

A really bad move, communication should be priority, not marketing bs ala "200%" faster. 

[Kisai]

On 12/5/2020 at 1:21 PM, ethannim said:

I think stores and companys should create a virtual line where every few hours you need to complete a captcha. 

Captchas do not work. People use the exact same technique that generates the captchas to solve them.

 

There's a three-pronged solution:

 

a) Membership required.

This would work for upgrades to existing products, eg PS5, Xbox Series X, Nintendo, etc. You preorder the item, put a deposit down. Only the account you play from is entitled to this, and people who have empty accounts, no play time, and no older game purchases don't get to pre-order. That keeps disposable accounts from being created just to flip them.

b) Personalized, the device is registered directly to the account and can not be removed for months. One could even go a step further and have every device laser-engraved with a the purchaser's name.

c) Retail virtual queue, as soon as all loyal customer pre-orders are fullfilled, the retail queue starts being filled. So you get an email notification to pick up your item, that you've already paid for, or are fulfilled by a retail logistics queue.

 

Because not everything is an internet connected device (like the Geforce part shortages) you have then use a different metric to figure out who's the scalper. Like in many cases, even the geforce parts could have been solved by using the Geforce Experience tool to determine who's already a Geforce user playing games.

 

But that's not perfect either. An example of gaming the system there would be to have a bunch of cheap geforce parts in systems that just idled various free games to run up the play time. Likewise, the playstation/xbox/nintendo accounts are usually married to the device, but allow other accounts to play on them.

 

So ultimately, you keep items out of scalpers hands by predicting the demand from the information gleamed off the accounts with high variety usage. For example, I have more than 650 games, with 300 of them installed. If I was interested in a Geforce 3080 or 3090, I feel that I should be more entitled to one than someone who has 1400 hours put into a single F2P game. So in this way, the way I would have done pre-orders would have been to use the accounts registered with Geforce Experience to count the amount of time and games installed/played, and have opted into "receive marketing from nVidia" and send them pre-order notifications through the Geforce Experience app until all inventory is accounted for. That removes the ability to bot the orders entirely. When new inventory arrives, repeat. 

 

That of course does nothing for the third party vendors. To which EVGA, MSI, ASUS etc sell through the retail channel. Electronics stores all have membership type of systems as well, so this can be used with them, but unfortunately unless you're only going to sell to people who have purchases from your store during the previous 24 months, this doesn't work, since you might have stock but no customers for it after a while.

 

 

 

[AndreiArgeanu]

Selling the only to customers in store. As in people queuing outside of a shop and only allowing 1 card per customers. Might not be the most ideal considering the current situation, but it's the easiest solution. For all I know scalpers can't send 100's of bots to wait in front of a store.