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Next Graphics Card Drop for OCUK.. !

Qw3r7y said:
Just gonna say that even the idea of excluding some people here from whatever, for whatever purpose or reason (not necessarily GPU drop related), based on the number of posts they've accrued, is a wholly narrow minded idea. :(

Some of us who have been around for 10 plus years and patronized OCUK for longer than that, lurk continuously within the forum, but are not the "posting frequently" type.

Just because we are not vociferous nor interactive, does not make us or our custom invalid.

/rant

Have great a great day and good luck in procuring a GPU if you're trying! :)
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I can attest to this. I've also posted about 11 times in the last 11 years.
 
I started to post more to get the free delivery just before my last upgrade. I wanted to get access to the MM, but I don't spend enough time on these forums to rack 1k posts? or however many you need for it.
But I think if you are active and get involved it should be possible to get the post counts. Maybe even go to the general section and start up random conversations lol.
 
I'm not a prolific poster either but have been a member for 17.5 years, both as a forum member and a customer. To be honest I've been trying to get a 3070 for ages now and have pretty much given up, will probably start looking again in a month or so. Spent a whole week pressing F5 on various stores and realised I wasn't having any fun at all! :p:p
 
Albaba said:
Spent a whole week pressing F5 on various stores and realised I wasn't having any fun at all!
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Indeed. Just had to put a 4GB RX 580 in a new build heading out the door, to my nephew, as I've thrown in the towel. Not gonna drive his 4K monitor, bless him. :rolleyes:

First world problem I suppose!
 
I write this with upmost respect for OCUK as a loyal customer of over 15 years, but genuinely I believe that if you did care about your customers you could easily manage this to give them to loyal forum community members and customers fairly easily without that much work. How hard is it to make a list and then carry out "offline" sales by contacting customers or forum members by good old phone call? It's not like your inventory is massive right now. Could you not do something like this:

1: Create a thread for each card people are interested in and get forum members to post in there that they are interested in purchasing card X at price X.

2: When OCUK have inventory you check the thread sign ups and do a query on the backend database for forum names that posted in that thread to pull out their linked OCUK account via the trust email (the one that gets loyal forum members free shipping). You could also then filter and sort based on age of account, number of forum posts if you wanted etc. Then take those OCUK actual account names from the output and run a query on your customer database which would be constructed to do something like:

where this OCUK account has at least say £1000 worth of previous orders
where this OCUK account has shopped with OCUK at least once in the last 2 years

or whatever

3: Once you have a list, you set up orders for those customers manually and/or phone them to take payment over the phone keeping the sale offline at all times.

The querying of databases could be done in minutes by a seasoned DBA. The ordering if it had to be done by phone...yeah....would take longer. But you would please your customers and I mean how many gpus do you even have coming in? Like 10 at a time by the sounds of it in some cases.

If you want something more advanced slightly, EVGA forums are doing something similar with sign up lists and then a unique code you get sent where you have 8 hours to purchase it at your leisure.

It can be done.
 
jaybee said:
I write this with upmost respect for OCUK as a loyal customer of over 15 years, but genuinely I believe that if you did care about your customers you could easily manage this to give them to loyal forum community members and customers fairly easily without that much work. How hard is it to make a list and then carry out "offline" sales by contacting customers or forum members by good old phone call? It's not like your inventory is massive right now. Could you not do something like this:

1: Create a thread for each card people are interested in and get forum members to post in there that they are interested in purchasing card X at price X.

2: When OCUK have inventory you check the thread sign ups and do a query on the backend database for forum names that posted in that thread to pull out their linked OCUK account via the trust email (the one that gets loyal forum members free shipping). You could also then filter and sort based on age of account, number of forum posts if you wanted etc. Then take those OCUK actual account names from the output and run a query on your customer database which would be constructed to do something like:

where this OCUK account has at least say £1000 worth of previous orders
where this OCUK account has shopped with OCUK at least once in the last 2 years

or whatever

3: Once you have a list, you set up orders for those customers manually and/or phone them to take payment over the phone keeping the sale offline at all times.

The querying of databases could be done in minutes by a seasoned DBA. The ordering if it had to be done by phone...yeah....would take longer. But you would please your customers and I mean how many gpus do you even have coming in? Like 10 at a time by the sounds of it in some cases.

If you want something more advanced slightly, EVGA forums are doing something similar with sign up lists and then a unique code you get sent where you have 8 hours to purchase it at your leisure.

It can be done.
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Nice ideas. However, it sounds like OcUK need to employ more staff to deal with current demand. In the long term they may be reluctant to do that.
 
ScottiB said:
I wouldn't want anyone to think that it's just GPUs.
We've got back orders on PSU, Cases, CPU, GPU, Gaming Chairs, coolers, fans, even bloody RGB Strips!!!
Right now, we have so many customers chasing vague ETAs, so we're not anxious to have even more customers on the 'wait train', which is why we've got so many things that are off sale.
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Ahh, so I was going to ring OCUK this afternoon to see if phoning an order through for any type of GPU might get me one, or at least on a queue to get one, but it sounds like it wont, so I wont add to all the people phoning you up.

I've now got all my other bits of my computer except a graphics card, and all I want is to be able to play Microsoft flight simulator (as sad as that is!!), I'm now thinking that I'll just spend £200 on a GTX1060ti as a temporary card and wait till the summer or whenever the greedy miners stop using bots to buy all the cards (lets hope the bitcoin bubble bursts soon!), or does anyone know of any better cards at the moment to get my computer working, as I thought the Ryzen processors had onboard graphics, but it turns out not, so I cant get any display at all out of my shiny new computer currently :(
 
jaybee said:
I write this with upmost respect for OCUK as a loyal customer of over 15 years, but genuinely I believe that if you did care about your customers you could easily manage this to give them to loyal forum community members and customers fairly easily without that much work. How hard is it to make a list and then carry out "offline" sales by contacting customers or forum members by good old phone call? It's not like your inventory is massive right now. Could you not do something like this:

1: Create a thread for each card people are interested in and get forum members to post in there that they are interested in purchasing card X at price X.

2: When OCUK have inventory you check the thread sign ups and do a query on the backend database for forum names that posted in that thread to pull out their linked OCUK account via the trust email (the one that gets loyal forum members free shipping). You could also then filter and sort based on age of account, number of forum posts if you wanted etc. Then take those OCUK actual account names from the output and run a query on your customer database which would be constructed to do something like:

where this OCUK account has at least say £1000 worth of previous orders
where this OCUK account has shopped with OCUK at least once in the last 2 years

or whatever

3: Once you have a list, you set up orders for those customers manually and/or phone them to take payment over the phone keeping the sale offline at all times.

The querying of databases could be done in minutes by a seasoned DBA. The ordering if it had to be done by phone...yeah....would take longer. But you would please your customers and I mean how many gpus do you even have coming in? Like 10 at a time by the sounds of it in some cases.

If you want something more advanced slightly, EVGA forums are doing something similar with sign up lists and then a unique code you get sent where you have 8 hours to purchase it at your leisure.

It can be done.
Click to expand...

SkillTim said:
Nice ideas. However, it sounds like OcUK need to employ more staff to deal with current demand. In the long term they may be reluctant to do that.
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ScottiB said:
This isn't a dig at you but, this is an example of what I meant a couple of days ago when I mentioned people taking incredibly complex situations and suggesting a really simple solution. I've specifically taken the "Chinese" part out of this post because there's absolutely no reason to distinguish between nationalities in this. Being at max capacity is both a blessing and a curse. You can't just invest in new facilities if you can't be sure that the demand will remain long term, this is how companies go boom and bust. Even if you can find a location you've got to be able to find the machinery that you need, and the staff to operate it...and then who trains these staff members when everybody you have on staff is already pushed to their limit? do you sacrifice productivity for a month or two?
So, great, you've made a massive upfront investment, found or built another building, populated it with machines, tools & a much larger work force, but can you source all of the parts that you need to double production? & what happens when your production capacity exceeds demand? you've now got double the costs without double the ongoing revenue. Can you survive in that situation?

it's a similar situation for us at the moment...phone lines jammed - "hire more staff" - but what about training? network capacity? phones? ongoing staffing costs once demand returns to normal?
Warehouse swamped - "hire more staff" - but what about training? Covid protocols? we've already got as many people as we can safely fit in our warehouse space..."get a bigger warehouse" - but what about our lease? what if we can't find a suitable location? "build one" - finding a site, planning permission, build, integrate network, move - that's a two year job at best.
"I'm fed up of waiting why don't you offer us an alternative card?" - see above, phone lines are jammed, we don't have the man power to contact hundreds of customers to have that conversation - "so hire more staff" - rinse & repeat - "allow us to do it online" - How? our website can't manage that - "get a new website" - We are! we've been working on it for two years already, off the shelf solutions don't exist for a company like us who require complex features such as those which you are asking for.

You see what I mean?
There are always complexities, blockers and long term considerations for ever apparently simple problem. People get angry because they believe that the solution to their problem is simple and think that companies are lazy or negligent for not carrying out said simple solution, but very few people truly grasp the actual magnitude of even the 'smallest' changes, and the bigger the company the harder it is to make such changes.
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sorry I'm in training on one of the new systems right now so I'm just rushing a response
 
It's absolutely not a simple fix, if it was a simple fix then you would have done it! What reason would you have to turn down extra business or provide a worse service to your customers?

As you say ScottiB, every situation is unique and there will be nuances that anyone not directly involved in the business won't know about. Well done for coming on here to defend yourself, but as you probably already know, it would be more productive in the long run to concentrate on your training course!
 
Sorry there are a load of different threads flying around and it's a bit confusing, but in another thread there is a talk of a queue already at OCUK for cards? How does one get on this queue?
 
At the end of the day as frustrating as it is waiting is all any of us can do until the situation is better. I have seen a lot of the AIB costs blamed on tariffs expiring but surely that applies to the USA as the UK negotiates as a separate entity and isn't subject to USA import tariffs or am I missing something here? Surely UK source stock direct to UK and don't source via USA after the USA have paid the extra tariff which they then unfairly pass on to the UK?
 
d_brennen said:
You can just pretend you are on the queue waiting, it's the same thing and no money down. Win-win
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seems to be the way to do it. rather not be several hundred quid down and still end up with sweet F.A ...

i was under the blame nobody banner, but since requesting my refund, ill be blaming Ocuk. dont you know im more important then everyone else ;)
 
Albaba said:
I'm not a prolific poster either but have been a member for 17.5 years, both as a forum member and a customer. To be honest I've been trying to get a 3070 for ages now and have pretty much given up, will probably start looking again in a month or so. Spent a whole week pressing F5 on various stores and realised I wasn't having any fun at all! :p:p
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That's exactly what I've been doing for the last 10 days !!, my F5 button is getting worn out trying to buy a RTX3070 !, I've actually won 5 RTX cards in the last 4 days, but every time, I get an order cancelled email about 90 seconds after paying for it, and them have to wait a few hours for the money to be refunded back to my bank account. I've now resigned myself to getting an GT1060 to get my system up and running and I'll wait for better availability to buy a decent RTX card
 
Topdonkey said:
That's exactly what I've been doing for the last 10 days !!, my F5 button is getting worn out trying to buy a RTX3070 !, I've actually won 5 RTX cards in the last 4 days, but every time, I get an order cancelled email about 90 seconds after paying for it, and them have to wait a few hours for the money to be refunded back to my bank account. I've now resigned myself to getting an GT1060 to get my system up and running and I'll wait for better availability to buy a decent RTX card
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Geez you serious? Order placed and paid then cancelled? Here I thought I was close because it was in my cart but couldn't process or it would dissappear from the cart.
 
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