How do you stop scalpers from buying the latest graphics cards and computer processors? Electronics retailer Newegg is responding with a lottery system that will share the popular products to participating consumers.
The only catch? It looks like you have to buy every product with a motherboard.
The company posted a web page for the “Newegg Shuffle” event on Wednesday, which users noticed on Reddit. The system works like this: during a three-hour window, consumers can enter a lottery for the popular product they want to buy. Newegg will then draw winners on the same day and notify them by email, removing the first-come-first-served approach. The winning consumers then have a short window of two hours to complete the purchase, otherwise their booking is forfeited.
Based on the website, the retailer used the lottery system on Nvidia’s RTX 3080 graphics cards and AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs, which were not in stock at all the major retailers. However, according to internet users who visited the website, according to the internet users, none of the items could be purchased individually. Instead, it had to be bought through bundle transactions, which increased the total price.
As a result, the reaction to the lottery system was outraged among computer builders on Reddit. ‘If you click on one of the items, you have provided a variety of combinations for which you can sign up. You could not sign up for an item on its own, ‘wrote one user.
(Credit: Newegg)
However, the Newegg Shuffle website was scrapped by Wednesday afternoon, making it unclear whether the event is one-off or whether we will see it again.
We’ve reached Newegg and we’ll update the story when we hear it. But last week, the dealer hinted that there is a lottery system. ‘For those who want a way to buy GPUs, CPUs and consoles, we have a long-term solution that will be available soon for hot items with little stock. More information coming soon, ”the company wrote in a tweet.