Nvidia fans are no stranger to the disappointment of stock issues, and the RTX 3080’s launch has sadly been no different. The green team has since apologised to those that couldn’t get a hold of the flagship graphics card on release day, and claimed that it’s attempting to stop the problem at its source by nixing scalpers.
Like kids on Christmas day, many excited customers flocked to Nvidia’s website in advance of its launch, only to witness the ‘Notify Me’ button immediately change to ‘Out of Stock.’ Within mere minutes, or more likely seconds, the RTX 3080 allocation had depleted and people were left with empty-handed disappointment. The same problem was apparent with third-party retailers, which led the manufacturer to one conclusion: scalpers were using a bot to sweep the floor before legitimate customers could blink.
It might be too little, too late for those that feel burned by the situation, but Nvidia has promised more stock is on its way, and this time, it’ll do “everything humanly possible, including manually reviewing orders, to get these cards in the hands of legitimate customers,” according to a statement given to PC Mag.
Newegg has denied that it suffered from an influx of bots thanks to reported security measures the storefront put in place to combat it, citing Black Friday-levels of traffic and limited inventory instead. Part of this stock limitation comes from Newegg’s strategy, however, splitting up its stock to sell more the following day.
Even if scalpers somehow didn’t manage to penetrate Newegg’s defenses, they’ve come out of the woodwork to gloat on now deleted social media posts caught by PC Mag about the situation, showcasing that bots are still a problem for Nvidia’s website.
The scalpers used a service called BounceAlerts, an information gathering tool which is geared towards resellers that can recuperate the $75 per month subscription. BounceAlerts sends a bot to scrape data with an automated script, quickly processing the order, payment information, and checkout with barely an interaction.
Limitations of one RTX 3080 per customer were already in place on Nvidia’s site, but with bots running automated scripts, it’s easy to run multiple accounts to grab one each in a matter of seconds. Manual reviews could help alleviate the problem, potentially using delivery addresses and other personally identifiable information to prevent more than one going out to any individual. Here’s hoping!