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For the past twelve months, electronic retailers have been under fire and investigated for mismanaging how they sell brand new consoles and high-end computer components. Online retailer Newegg this week launched a new, quirky system for selling low-demand electronics with low supply: the Newegg Shuffle. (Or, as the site’s metadata calls it, the Newegg Popular Product Lottery Queue.)
If you catch this article early enough on Friday, January 22nd, consider it a suggestion to visit everything at 5:00 PM ET and submit a product purchase request. Really: Do it now if you’re interested in recent AMD CPUs, Nvidia GPUs or the digital PlayStation 5. It’s free to try. We will wait.
OK, so, the process might have been a little confusing. What’s up with the Newegg Shuffle?
Shuffling in a forced bundle? Not necessarily, but probably
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Official explanation.
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The list of primary call options.
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However, once you click on one, you get more options. Some are, as expected, the standard a la carte option. Otherwise, more expensive bundles are thanks to forced motherboard additions.
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And some of the options hide the fact that it is only presented as a bundle.
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Lottery ticket confirmed. Now we wait a few hours – and then get a fair amount of time to confirm a purchase.
The Newegg Shuffle buzz began earlier this week when smart experts spotted a limited lottery event under the same name in messages sent to a limited group of Newegg customers. A variety of CPUs and graphics cards have been advertised, and the introductory page contains a point of sale: choose what you want to buy, log in to your established Newegg customer profile, and submit a request. Do this at a certain time and within a few hours you will be notified if your account has been selected to purchase one of the products you have selected. (That is, you can try to sign up for each presentation, or just one, without the choices apparently changing your chances of being chosen at random.)
However, the problems with the early testing come in the form of angry customers sharing images of what the shopping interface actually looks like. After clicking on a shiny new AMD processor or an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, you will see the real shopping option: a forced batch. It turns out that every option has to buy a brand new motherboard, even if you do not need one. This was especially bad in the case of Nvidia’s graphics cards, which are compatible with the general PCI-e 3.0 standard and therefore do not require a new motherboard for interested computer gamers.
When PC Mag pressed on this anti-consumer forced bundle promotion, Newegg explained that the Shuffle feature was still in ‘beta’. The promotion will be reduced with forced bundles once it is introduced to all customers. Friday’s launch of Newegg Shuffle confirmed this – but a few forced bundles remain.
Both available AMD CPUs, the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X, can be purchased as stand-alone options. However, they are also listed with bundles, which means that you actually want to buy them better from Newegg if you are willing to link a motherboard purchase to the CPU. The same goes for one of the promotional GPUs, an ASUS fragrance from the RTX 3070, which can be purchased either a la carte or with an ASUS motherboard.
Three other GPUs appear in the promotion; two of them can only be purchased a la carte, and one, the ASUS RTX 3080, can only be purchased with an ASUS motherboard (for a whopping $ 1179.98).
And the full digital PlayStation 5 on offer can only purchased as part of a bundle, adding a staggering $ 160 to the normal price of $ 399 with an extra controller (sure), a 1080p webcam (meh) and a media remote control (ugh). These are some serious Gamestop vibes, and not in a good way.
Microsoft takes the lead in space
The worst part of Newegg Shuffle is that it is probably the best system currently available on the market for interested buyers for PC parts. Otherwise, it’s best to follow Twitter accounts and online shopping guides to know exactly when high-quality computer components and consoles are in stock – since retailers seem completely uninterested, you know and let’s pre-order things and enter a purchase drive.
The only exception in this frenzy seems to be Xbox Series X / S. Microsoft has developed a somewhat scale-resistant purchasing system in the form of Xbox All Access. Combining a monthly subscriber price with a dedicated Xbox account (and associated mailing address) can get you a shiny new Xbox. Such systems are a pain for scalpers to transfer account ownership with. (As a bonus, buying a X / S series this way can save you money compared to buying the hardware and associated subscriber rates at retail prices.)
Until we see more retailers embracing customer verification systems, purchase limits, and anti-scalping efforts, we’ll likely see more funky “lottery” systems like Newegg, complete with predatory package deals.