According to Tom's Hardware, the American retailer has limited access to orders for RTX 3000 graphics cards since February 10. Buyers can add them to the cart and pay only if they purchase a Totaltech annual subscription for $200. The seller did this in order to fight dealers and scalpers.
With a Totaltech subscription, Best Buy premium customers get access to dedicated support programs, including 24/7 technical support and the AppleCare+ Extended Warranty Program. The retailer also provides access to exclusive prices on various products for its customers in the United States through this subscription.
The experts of the publication explained that Best Buy for the first time hid sales of the GeForce RTX 3000, including versions of the Founders Edition, which are sold at NVIDIA's recommended price, per subscription and it is not clear whether it will be for testing purposes or will always be so. They found that in the end, this measure only slightly saved the situation with the sale of video cards. If, without a subscription, they were dismantled in a few minutes, as buyers had been waiting for this promotion for a whole month. After the introduction of the subscription, all the cards were sold out in a few hours, until the customers understood what they needed to do and paid for the subscription in order to be able to purchase the card.
According to PC Mag, many Best Buy customers have criticized this innovation. In their opinion, this should have been warned in advance. In fact, only Best Buy benefited from this, not buyers, since it did not help much with resellers. The store simply forced the scalpers to invest in a subscription. Then they began to act even more aggressively, since they could buy not one card, but several, for example, one bought 7 different cards at once. Obviously not for myself.
In addition, not all customers were able to purchase the card after signing up for a Totaltech subscription. Best Buy has queued them up. Because of this, they did not have time to get what they wanted. Such customers said that the subscription is a waste of time, nerves and money.
In July 2021, 20 Best Buy began selling scarce GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards issued by sellers an hour and a half before the sale opened. One customer in this case can only receive one card per RTX 30 series card.
In February 2021, the Newegg electronics store began to fight resellers with the introduction of a lottery system, where winnings are an opportunity to buy a scarce card. The store registration system is protected from registering multiple accounts per user and other such schemes when resellers try to increase their chances of winning the lottery. The store blocks such accounts.
In early 2021, John Carmack proposed a way to deal with the shortage of next-generation video cards and game consoles. In his opinion, for this market segment, it is necessary to create a transparent system of auctions directly from manufacturers in order to more effectively distribute graphics devices among users, since the existing market has completely caved in to scalping using bots and the need for mining.
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