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In the past 12 months, electronics retailers have been increasingly criticized and criticized for mishandling the way they sell new consoles and next-generation PC components. This week, online retailer Newegg introduced a unique new system for selling high-demand, low-supply electronics: the Newegg Shuffle. (Or, as the site’s metadata calls it, Newegg Popular Product Lottery Queue.)
If you read this article early enough on Friday, January 22, consider this a suggestion to drop everything to run to the site around 5:00 pm Eastern time and make a purchase request for the product. Really: Do it right now if you’re interested in recent AMD CPUs, Nvidia GPUs or the all-digital PlayStation 5. It’s free to try. Well wait.
OK, so this process may have been a little bit confusing. What’s going on with Newegg Shuffle?
Packing in a forced package? Not necessarily, but likely
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Official explanation.
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The list of main purchase options.
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After clicking on one, however, you get more options. Some are the standard à la carte option, as expected. Otherwise, they are more expensive packages thanks to forced motherboard additions.
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And some of the options hide the fact that they are only offered as a package.
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Lottery ticket confirmed. Now, we wait a few hours – and then we have plenty of time to confirm the purchase.
The Newegg Shuffle buzz started earlier this week, when seasoned shoppers noticed a limited time lottery event with the same name in messages sent to a limited group of Newegg customers. It advertised a variety of CPUs and graphics cards, and the home page included a pitch: Choose what you want to buy, access your established Newegg customer profile and submit a request. Do this over a period of time and in a few hours, you will be notified if your account has been selected to purchase any of the products you have chosen. (That is, you can try to subscribe to all listings, or just one, without the options apparently changing your chances of being selected at random.)
The problems with that initial test, however, came in the form of angry customers sharing images of what the buying interface really looked like. After clicking on a new AMD processor or an Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, the real purchase option: a forced package. Each option seemed to require the purchase of a new motherboard, even if you didn’t need one. This was particularly noticeable in the case of Nvidia graphics cards, which are compatible with the common PCI-e 3.0 standard and therefore do not need a new motherboard for interested PC players.
When pressed by PC Mag about this forced package consumer anti-consumer promotion, Newegg clarified that his Shuffle feature was still in “beta”. The promotion would reduce forced packages as soon as it was launched to all customers. The release of Newegg Shuffle on Friday confirmed this – but some forced packages remain.
Both AMD CPUs available today, Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X, can be purchased as standalone options. They are additionally listed with packages, however, and that means that you essentially have a better chance of buying them from Newegg if you are willing to attach a purchased motherboard to the CPU. The same goes for one of the promotion’s GPUs, an ASUS flavor of the RTX 3070, which can be purchased à la carte or with an included ASUS motherboard.
Three other GPUs appear in the promotion; two of them can only be purchased à la carte, and one, the ASUS RTX 3080, can only be purchased with a built-in ASUS motherboard (for a colossal combined price of $ 1179.98).
And the all-digital PlayStation 5 on offer can only be purchased as part of a package, adding an incredible $ 160 to its normal price of $ 399 with an extra controller (for sure), a 1080p webcam (meh) and a media remote control (ugh). These are some serious Gamestop vibrations, and not in a good way.
Microsoft taking the lead in the field
The worst part about Newegg Shuffle is that it is arguably the best system currently on the market for interested PC parts buyers. Otherwise, your best bet is to follow well-informed Twitter accounts and online shopping guides to find out exactly when the latest computer components and consoles are in stock – as retailers seem completely uninterested in, you know, us let things pre-order them and get in a shopping queue.
The only exception in this madness seems to be the Xbox Series X / S. Microsoft has developed a money-proof purchase system in the form of Xbox All Access. Combine a monthly subscription price with a dedicated Xbox account (and associated mailing address) and you can have a brand new Xbox. These systems are a pain for money changers to transfer ownership of the account. (As a bonus, buying an X / S Series in this way can save money compared to purchasing hardware and subscription fees attached at retail prices.)
Until we see more retailers embracing customer verification systems, buying limits and anti-scalper efforts, we are likely to see more modern “lottery” systems like Newegg’s, complete with predatory bundled tie offers.