Beating off scalpers is not rocket science (for the retail/vendors)

[Haggisman]

Imagine there were no such things as online retailers and we had to physically go to a shop, wait in a queue and buy one. No automated stock alerts, bots, etc etc. This problem wouldn't exist.

You mean make them click & collect only? I'd be happy with that as I'm only about 40 mins from the shop, but that would screw a lot of people over...

 

[BUDFORCE]

You mean make them click & collect only? I'd be happy with that as I'm only about 40 mins from the shop, but that would screw a lot of people over...

Haha I'd not even thought of that. Was thinking before the age of the internet or at least when internet shopping wasn't a thing.

I'd be fine with click and collect only, be a nice excuse to get the motorcycle out on a good run.

But as you say, would screw a lot of people.

But then, the current system isn't?????

 

[JediFragger]

the 6700xt isnt such a great card, or great at mining, silly pricing has nothing to do with it either, if it were such a great card, it would be much sort after, but there is less take up, its the higher end cards that the majority is after and such in short supply due to the known factors

Used one? Used a 3060Ti/3070/3080/3080Ti/6800XT/6900XT? No I thought not, your opinion isn't very valid is it. 6700XT is a cracking little card and I was well impressed for just half the CU's of the 6900XT, held up well even in 4K!! 12GB is great too, last a good long while imo.

It just needs to be a lot closer to MSRP and it'll fly out

 

[g67575]

Would've thought the 6700XT will work very nicely with FSR, at 4k.

 

[BUDFORCE]

It just needs to be a lot closer to MSRP and it'll fly out

It's not far off, I'm not buying one given the price, I could afford it sure, but it's out of principal partly and that the money can be spent on other things.

But yes if it were £200 cheaper I'd hit the button now.

 

[BallistixOnZ490]

The place selling the FE did have captchas, I had to so about 4 of them while refreshing and got no buy button.

Loads of the successful purchases have also ended up on Ebay anyway.

 

[Borsch]

Why bother. Extra IT developement cost for what? Oc ui sells the same number of cards regardless

Imo, there are two answers:
1. This should be imposed on the retailers by the vendors - like the GPU review embargo is imposed on the independent media.
2. By your logic, why would OCUK run this forum? Maybe I'm overoptimistic, but I believe in "good guys finishing first" - good PR, healthy supportive community recoup the costs and are financially beneficial in the end.

There's flaws in this system, as with most.

What if you bought one and it broke, then wanted to purchase another due to very extended replacement times. You'd be on the blacklist having already purchased a card.

What if you had two systems, ie a workstation and a gaming desktop, and required a powerful GPU in each.

Or if you wanted to gift one to a child? Needed more than one for a company use?

Bots can be limited, scalpers cannot without detriment to the regular consumer.

When making comparisons, it's is always good to have a baseline. Are the people in your hypothetical situations better off under the current scheme of things? No, they are not. With anti-scalping measures in place one could still "buy another" - from another vendor, using friend's details, buying off ebay. Also, the measures need not be permanent - once the demand subsides, retail can drop the checks.

In a perfect world, a scalper with lots of GPUs will get stuck with them and be forced to give up and sell them for a huge loss. Surely that would be far more satisfying? I'd love that.

Unfortunately the consumer votes to keep scalpers in business.

In a perfect world, we would have no scalpers, everybody would have whatever they want -GPUs, mansions, ferraris, etc

The place selling the FE did have captchas, I had to so about 4 of them while refreshing and got no buy button.

Loads of the successful purchases have also ended up on Ebay anyway.

Because that place is like an island in an ocean. It is swamped by genuine customers that have no other place to go. And by the scalpers who use up their identity resource to buy their single allocated card and put it on ebay. However, the identity resource is limited, their scalping is once off (or near enough) .

 

[Borsch]

But how long would you beat them off for?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvffxxhoBIk

"All hands to the pumps"

Awesome, even better than AVGN's review of Beat'em and Eat'em for Atari 2600

 

[Kaapstad]

Why would shops and hardware vendors be bothered by scalpers anyway, providing the former can get a nice markup on the cards before they get in the hands of the latter there is little incentive to do anything.

I saw an article for a shop selling 3080 Ti cards at MSRP then noticed in the same article they were also charging an extra £300 for a slightly OC version of one of the cards lol, some serious scalping going on at that shop even though they were pretending to claim the moral high ground.

I also think all the AIB partners need investigating as I suspect a very high percentage of their output is going straight to miners at a big markup.

 

[Sleepy Stu]

Haha the idiots trying to sell their 3080ti on ebay for over £2500. There are 3090's new on there for the same price so why would anybody pay the same money as a 3090 for a 3080ti doh!!

 

[Borsch]

Why would shops and hardware vendors be bothered by scalpers anyway, providing the former can get a nice markup on the cards before they get in the hands of the latter there is little incentive to do anything.

That is the million dollar question here. The answer is gaming ecosystem and PR for the vendors and customer ecosystem and also PR for the shops. These are not empty words either, as seen from this OCUK staff post

Not true, sorry for any confusion. Since we know that we can't trust our website to manage the traffic currently we decided to follow the same process that we've followed for the last few graphics card launches. List the cards, don't sell.

We aren't selling the cards currently, at all, we are working on a way to best serve our loyal customer base and we'll hopefully be in a position to do something next week.

The sales guys were all under instruction to say "no we can't sell you a Ti today" but it's our fault that we didn't explain it clearly enough to them why.

Also, before anyone says 'but you've got systems available with Ti in'...correct. I was given a grand total of about 30 units across four models by my closest SI partners. This is a LOT less than the retail allocation received so far.

For anybody who thinks we're wrong for doing this, the information from our ecommerce director is that in the last hour 96% of the traffic on our site was from "bots". Had we actually put the cards on sale, there's almost no chance that genuine customers would have been able to buy.

If it was all about short term gain of shifting GPUs to whoever pays, the post above would not happen.

 

[Valentins]

Balamory storie. Everyone have a dream. Sold old GC with huge profits for covering new card price. And next day same person seat on the forum with clever face and blame scalpers. Of course its other.

 

[g67575]

Nice to see some retailers selling the rtx 3080 TI at RRP price (if there's ever stock), shame no RRP commitment to other models though, maybe later.

Hopefully there will be no need to beat anyone off now

I wonder if anyone will be still be looking to buy the virtually pointless RTX 3090?

But selling the RTX 3080 at ~£650 would almost seem reasonable. I think what many have struggled to grasp, is how low the production capacity and yields for these GPU dies (and availability of GDDR6x VRAM) has been, it's not out of deliberate cruelty.

The only choice for 99% of buyers who want to buy now, is to choose models that are available in higher quantities, and hopefully try to buy them at RRP (like the RTX 3060 TI /RTX 3070 FE). I'm not sure if this is even remotely possible for AMD GPUs though.