Amazon creating a system to try and stop scalpers from buying up large quantities of high demand products.

[GwhoisJ]

Summary

Amazon is launching a program that will enter customers into a group for an opportunity to buy one of a high demand product. They're starting with the PS5 and then adding the XBox Series X next. Apparently there will be anti-bot mechanisms and stuff too.

 

Quotes

Quote

The new ordering option will allow customers to request an invitation to buy high-demand items from the product detail page, at no additional cost. Any customer with an Amazon account can request an invitation to purchase the item, which means that you don’t need a Prime account to send in a request.

Quote

Amazon says that although bad actors make up a small percentage of activity on its marketplace, it’s committed to preventing them from negatively impacting the shopping experience for users. The new ordering experience should give Amazon customers a better chance at getting their hands on high-demand products with limited quantities because it aims to eliminate bad actors who buy products and then resell them at higher prices, which has been happening with gaming consoles over the past years.

 

My thoughts

Overall I think that this is a great idea, especially if they are able to implement good methods for limiting bots. Just worried that it won't be implemented well or that it'll be limited to just a few products like only consoles and not PC hardware.

 

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/02/amazon-invite-only-ordering-option-ps5-xbox-series-x/

[da na]

Will it be people who intend on buying X valuable, or will it only be open to certain accounts, 90% of which probably have no desire of such a purchase? That's the big flaw I immediately see.

[WereCat]

All products will feature LSR (Low Scalp Rate) technology. Meaning, there will be 50% chance of it arriving DoA and drastically reducing the scalpers chance to flip it. 

 

jokes aside... are we going back in time? 

 

My parents tell me stories about waiting in line for fruit, jeans, etc... and it selling out almost immediately with no another availability for weeks or months. And if was also only X amount per customer. 

[GwhoisJ]

@Mel0nMan It says in the article that you have to sign up for a chance to get an invitation, so that shouldn't be a problem I think.

[Origami Cactus]

Would be cool, but Amazon scalps themselves too, so wouldn’t change much.

In europe cpus and gpus "sold and shipped by amazon" are consistently mich higher priced than actual retailers.

For example 5800x3d was 579€, while at actual retailers can be had for 498€.

[An0maly_76]

38 minutes ago, GwhoisJ said:

Summary

Amazon is launching a program that will enter customers into a group for an opportunity to buy one of a high demand product. They're starting with the PS5 and then adding the XBox Series X next. Apparently there will be anti-bot mechanisms and stuff too.

Took them long enough...

[ZetZet]

16 hours ago, WereCat said:

My parents tell me stories about waiting in line for fruit, jeans, etc... and it selling out almost immediately with no another availability for weeks or months. And if was also only X amount per customer. 

Sort of, but not really. Purchasing power in the world increased so much that now what used to be low-ish volume luxury goods are becoming mainstream products, so they need to scale production to match and it's not possible to do overnight.

 

 

You can still buy all the fruit and jeans you want, because those are already cheap commodities. 

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, GwhoisJ said:

Summary

Amazon is launching a program that will enter customers into a group for an opportunity to buy one of a high demand product. They're starting with the PS5 and then adding the XBox Series X next. Apparently there will be anti-bot mechanisms and stuff too.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

Overall I think that this is a great idea, especially if they are able to implement good methods for limiting bots. Just worried that it won't be implemented well or that it'll be limited to just a few products like only consoles and not PC hardware.

 

Sources

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/02/amazon-invite-only-ordering-option-ps5-xbox-series-x/

Better late than never.

 

Keep in mind that this is probably in response to how "Best Buy" decided to charge people for access to it.

 

There have always been ways to solve this. The kickstarter model proves that's possible. The problem is that businesses have just-in-time logisitics, and taking preorders is often not viable for products that started production months ago.

[Gamer Schnitzel]

16 hours ago, WereCat said:

All products will feature LSR (Low Scalp Rate) technology. Meaning, there will be 50% chance of it arriving DoA and drastically reducing the scalpers chance to flip it. 

 

jokes aside... are we going back in time? 

 

My parents tell me stories about waiting in line for fruit, jeans, etc... and it selling out almost immediately with no another availability for weeks or months. And if was also only X amount per customer. 

Let me guess, you're a scalper? Since you dislike the idea of only being able to buy X amount.

 

Let me teach you something strange about the world. EVERYTHING IS LIMITED. Even food is planned beforehand and producers only produce sufficient amounts for people to buy and eat. Producers don't make as much food as they can. They make just enough. This is why sometimes there are times when the supermarket is out of a specific food. because they underestimated demand, not because they could not make more. Why should there be UNLIMITED amounts of graphics cards? Do you think all the materials grow on trees..? Grow up and get some education. The world that your parents grew up in and yours are the exactly same world. The difference is that your parents were significantly more intelligent than you whereas you are sheltered and have absolutely no idea how the world works. Back in the day when the car broke people fixed it themselves, today kids have no idea how cars work. Back in the day when the phone broke people opened it up and fixed it, now it is glued together and people like you believe that phones run on magic.

[WereCat]

10 minutes ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Let me guess, you're a scalper? Since you dislike the idea of only being able to buy X amount.

 

Let me teach you something strange about the world. EVERYTHING IS LIMITED. Even food is planned beforehand and producers only produce sufficient amounts for people to buy and eat. Producers don't make as much food as they can. They make just enough. This is why sometimes there are times when the supermarket is out of a specific food. because they underestimated demand, not because they could not make more. Why should there be UNLIMITED amounts of graphics cards? Do you think all the materials grow on trees..? Grow up and get some education. The world that your parents grew up in and yours are the exactly same world. The difference is that your parents were significantly more intelligent than you whereas you are sheltered and have absolutely no idea how the world works. Back in the day when the car broke people fixed it themselves, today kids have no idea how cars work. Back in the day when the phone broke people opened it up and fixed it, now it is glued together and people like you believe that phones run on magic.

Jeez, you took this way too personally. 

 

I'm not a scalper. I know you can't have unlimited stuff and it costs resources and energy. 

I'm expressing my frustration BECAUSE of scalping and that we have to now have systems like this in place in the first place. 

 

Perhaps my analogy was not that great or you took it way too far.

[Arika]

1 hour ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Let me guess, you're a scalper? Since you dislike the idea of only being able to buy X amount.

 

Let me teach you something strange about the world. EVERYTHING IS LIMITED. Even food is planned beforehand and producers only produce sufficient amounts for people to buy and eat. Producers don't make as much food as they can. They make just enough. This is why sometimes there are times when the supermarket is out of a specific food. because they underestimated demand, not because they could not make more. Why should there be UNLIMITED amounts of graphics cards? Do you think all the materials grow on trees..? Grow up and get some education. The world that your parents grew up in and yours are the exactly same world. The difference is that your parents were significantly more intelligent than you whereas you are sheltered and have absolutely no idea how the world works. Back in the day when the car broke people fixed it themselves, today kids have no idea how cars work. Back in the day when the phone broke people opened it up and fixed it, now it is glued together and people like you believe that phones run on magic.

How does this have ANYTHING to do with what @WereCat was saying?

 

I honestly have no idea what you read, but its clearly not the same thing that was written. Instead of getting emotional and telling people to "grow up and get some education" maybe you should re-read the post more than once prior to responding to determine what was actually being said.

[MageTank]

1 hour ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Let me guess, you're a scalper? Since you dislike the idea of only being able to buy X amount.

 

Let me teach you something strange about the world. EVERYTHING IS LIMITED. Even food is planned beforehand and producers only produce sufficient amounts for people to buy and eat. Producers don't make as much food as they can. They make just enough. This is why sometimes there are times when the supermarket is out of a specific food. because they underestimated demand, not because they could not make more. Why should there be UNLIMITED amounts of graphics cards? Do you think all the materials grow on trees..? Grow up and get some education. The world that your parents grew up in and yours are the exactly same world. The difference is that your parents were significantly more intelligent than you whereas you are sheltered and have absolutely no idea how the world works. Back in the day when the car broke people fixed it themselves, today kids have no idea how cars work. Back in the day when the phone broke people opened it up and fixed it, now it is glued together and people like you believe that phones run on magic.

 

It's also very difficult to read this seriously while seeing the "plot" of your anime profile picture moving in my peripheral, lol.

[Quackers101]

so where is the system to reduce e-waste? as soo much crap is sold on amazon, some that are the wish.com zone of items.

[tikker]

6 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Let me teach you something strange about the world. EVERYTHING IS LIMITED. Even food is planned beforehand and producers only produce sufficient amounts for people to buy and eat. Producers don't make as much food as they can. They make just enough. This is why sometimes there are times when the supermarket is out of a specific food. because they underestimated demand, not because they could not make more.

We definitely do not make "just enough". In fact, we produce susbtantially more than people buy and eat as most of our food system is based on there being a notable surplus of goods. Stores look bad if shelves aren't fully stocked, restaurants look bad if their spinach wasn't freshly hunted that morning and lots of fruit and vegetables are used otherwise at best or thrown away at worst because they don't look pretty enough to sit at your local grocerer's shelf. As for empty shelves, supermarkets around me tend to provide a reason why shelves are empty or poorly stocked and those reasons have always been supply chain issues or because harvest was lost / lesser for some reason. Food waste is a big problem and local bakeries are among the few shops that I see actually run out of wares like they're "supposed to" throughout the day. It's a challenging issue to tackle, as you also don't want to ride the line to producing just enough too closely, but we're definitely not simply producing as much as people buy and eat.

6 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Why should there be UNLIMITED amounts of graphics cards? Do you think all the materials grow on trees..? Grow up and get some education. The world that your parents grew up in and yours are the exactly same world. The difference is that your parents were significantly more intelligent than you whereas you are sheltered and have absolutely no idea how the world works.

The world was a different place for previous generations and will be very different places for the generations after us.

6 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Back in the day when the car broke people fixed it themselves, today kids have no idea how cars work. Back in the day when the phone broke people opened it up and fixed it, now it is glued together and people like you believe that phones run on magic.

To me this will always be just biased elitism, if used in a "we were better" way, that I believe every generation will have its own version of. Modern day phones are nothing compared to those of yonder. For better or for worse, that has to a degree an inherent "unrepairability" to it. Tech and such was also much less accessible and you had to be capable to use the device in question in the first place by knowing what it could and couldn't do. Playing a game, operating a computer, none of that requires knowledge of how they work nowadays. That makes it seem like people were smarter, but you're only seeing the people of the past who cared enough about it and overlook how accessible things are today. Especially with new emerging stuff there wouldn't be many garages or repair shops back then. Nowadays basic phone or computer use doesn't require you to know how OSes or computers work and finding someone capable of fixing your car or phone, even a guide if you want to give it a spin, has never been easier. There's no shame in bringing your car to the garage to get something fixed, or bringing your phone somewhere to get a screen fixed or battery replaced. All of thes things are hugely more complex compared to what they were even a short time ago. You are simply bringing it to people who studied and/or practised to be able to do it correctly.

 

 

23 hours ago, GwhoisJ said:

The new ordering option will allow customers to request an invitation to buy high-demand items from the product detail page, at no additional cost. Any customer with an Amazon account can request an invitation to purchase the item, which means that you don’t need a Prime account to send in a request.

This brings me back to the old preorder days. Announcements of new games I got from magazines, TV game shows and stores. For particularly anticipiated games or new consoles you'd then physically sign up at the store such that they could try and get at least as many as the number of people that signed up for one. Let's hope tactics like this can at least ward of the less motivated scalpers.

[ZetZet]

22 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

Would be cool, but Amazon scalps themselves too, so wouldn’t change much.

In europe cpus and gpus "sold and shipped by amazon" are consistently mich higher priced than actual retailers.

For example 5800x3d was 579€, while at actual retailers can be had for 498€.

I guess that's the main idea, take the scalper profit for themselves. Honestly I prefer it that way if my experience shopping is improved. Will never buy from a scalper, but I would maybe pay a slight premium to get it early from a store or to get in line and have it guaranteed.

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, ZetZet said:

I guess that's the main idea, take the scalper profit for themselves. Honestly I prefer it that way if my experience shopping is improved. Will never buy from a scalper, but I would maybe pay a slight premium to get it early from a store or to get in line and have it guaranteed.

In a perfect world, we would not over-produce anything. Everything would be engineered to generate little to no wasted products. In the case of CPU's and GPU's there would be no atom, i3/i5 parts, there would only be the i7 part, there would only be the x80 gpu part, and they would all be pre-ordered a year in advance.

 

Food is the only thing we have to over-produce by design because of the difficulty in ensuring the product exists in the end. Like if a crop is wiped out, you have to get that crop from somewhere else. 

 

Like look at how many times we've had to throw out lettuce because of salmonella. Unfortunately, with meat products this means a lot of animals are raised only to end up in the landfill if they become sick before they can be butchered.

 

But for physical products that have no actual shelf-life (eg computer products), there is no reason why we can't just preorder the thing a year in advance if we want it on day 1. That tells the manufacturer the minimum units they need to produce, and they can guarantee the price. If you miss the pre-order, then you're going to pay the retail price which might be higher.

[Video Beagle]

On 6/3/2022 at 7:19 AM, Gamer Schnitzel said:

Let me guess, you're a scalper? Since you dislike the idea of only being able to buy X amount.

 

Let me teach you something strange about the world. EVERYTHING IS LIMITED. Even food is planned beforehand and producers only produce sufficient amounts for people to buy and eat. Producers don't make as much food as they can. They make just enough. This is why sometimes there are times when the supermarket is out of a specific food. because they underestimated demand, not because they could not make more. Why should there be UNLIMITED amounts of graphics cards? Do you think all the materials grow on trees..? Grow up and get some education. The world that your parents grew up in and yours are the exactly same world. The difference is that your parents were significantly more intelligent than you whereas you are sheltered and have absolutely no idea how the world works. Back in the day when the car broke people fixed it themselves, today kids have no idea how cars work. Back in the day when the phone broke people opened it up and fixed it, now it is glued together and people like you believe that phones run on magic.

Someone woke up and chose violence today.

[TetraSky]

Eh, I'm fine with this if it means it can prevent people from buying dozens of them. Certainly better than BestBuy's BS where you have to pay them extra for the privilege of maybe getting one.

 

I hope they implement this in Canada and for more than just consoles.

 

On 6/2/2022 at 4:43 PM, WereCat said:

My parents tell me stories about waiting in line for fruit, jeans, etc... and it selling out almost immediately with no another availability for weeks or months. And if was also only X amount per customer. 

It's still a thing today. My local supermarkets often impose limits of 2 or 3 per item if it's something that's heavily discounted. Like steaks. Usually, the price is around $22/kg. But rarely, it drops to $8/kg. It's to prevent one person from buying the entire stocks, which has been known to happen before.

Heck, the whole waiting in line for limited quantities is basically what Black Friday used to be (might still be like that, but I'm in Canada, it was never really huge and died down considerably in the recent years with online shopping)

[BuckGup]

You use the benefits of a free market to try and stop a characteristic of a free market... I really do not understand why people are so butt hurt over scalpers. A scalper would not exist if people were not paying the prices they ask. This is just another LHR as the scalpers will find another method in no time at all. You would think a company as large as Amazon would know basic principles of e-commerce by now. Oh well Hail hydra 

[CTR640]

You know when scalpers have gone too far when bs like this have to be created/developed. My God, scalpers are as worst as rats with pest.

 

But it's also the dumb and weak minded customers giving up so they pay the scalpers. Both are worst.

[Eaglerino]

13 hours ago, BuckGup said:

You use the benefits of a free market to try and stop a characteristic of a free market... I really do not understand why people are so butt hurt over scalpers. A scalper would not exist if people were not paying the prices they ask. This is just another LHR as the scalpers will find another method in no time at all. You would think a company as large as Amazon would know basic principles of e-commerce by now. Oh well Hail hydra 

sheesh the internet really can't make up its mind

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, TetraSky said:

It's still a thing today. My local supermarkets often impose limits of 2 or 3 per item if it's something that's heavily discounted. Like steaks. Usually, the price is around $22/kg. But rarely, it drops to $8/kg. It's to prevent one person from buying the entire stocks, which has been known to happen before.

 

Heck, the whole waiting in line for limited quantities is basically what Black Friday used to be (might still be like that, but I'm in Canada, it was never really huge and died down considerably in the recent years with online shopping)

Not really. Black Friday and Boxing Day sales are not what you think it is. Every store will have a few loss-leader items, but everything else in the store isn't really on sale, they're at the highest prices they've ever been. You see this with Amazon, Dell, and Steam as well. It's customer psychology. They see a discount and think it's a deal, when it fact that sale price is not a bargain, and that it's actually been "marked up" to look like one.

 

What Boxing Day is supposed to be, is a way to fire-sale everything that that didn't sell before Christmas. Cause these things were all ordered back in February of the previous year, so they need the inventory space.

 

Now supermarkets often have loss-leader sales with limits. The reason they do this, is because if there was no limit, someone would just come in the store buy all the loss-leader items and then go sell them on the curb outside the store. We saw this very real thing happen during the first three months of the pandemic when shelves got emptied in stores due to panic buying, especially toilet paper. Then people were selling them out of the car in the same parking lot.

 

In a perfect world, we wouldn't waste resources on producing low-quality products for high profits, we would just produce the high quality product at a fair price, in advance, and people who failed to preorder will then have to buy it off someone who did, or wait for the next round.

 

The amount of profit-driven garbage that North America produces alone (eg packaging for fast food as an example) is a symptom of our processes not being efficient in the right places, and there not being trust and safety in the logistics chains. 

 

The pandemic showed how truly brittle that logistics chain is. The consequences are likely going to result in fully-automated shipping systems and factories that were previously run "cheaply" with humans.

 

[TetraSky]

4 hours ago, Kisai said:

You see this with Amazon, Dell, and Steam as well. It's customer psychology. They see a discount and think it's a deal, when it fact that sale price is not a bargain, and that it's actually been "marked up" to look like one.

For the perfect example of this, was looking at hair clippers recently and saw this one

Spoiler

"list price: 64.99", but it's on "sale" for 49.95.... Except if you use Keepa to check the price history of the past year, it has been at 49.95 for the majority of that time frame. It's not a sale if it's always on sale... It really is to give the illusion of a bargain.

[ZetZet]

35 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

"list price: 64.99", but it's on "sale" for 49.95.... Except if you use Keepa to check the price history of the past year, it has been at 49.95 for the majority of that time frame. It's not a sale if it's always on sale... It really is to give the illusion of a bargain.

That's illegal in EU, but they do not seem to be policing, much.

 

[Quackers101]

2 hours ago, ZetZet said:

That's illegal in EU, but they do not seem to be policing, much.

wonder how steam does it, but I assume you have to set a period and can't just have it on sale at all times. unless you set a new price? not too sure.

other market but think they did something like that, and if there is a special event if put at sale in that period.