How Bounce Alerts Bots Dominated the Botched RTX 3080 Launch

[Bubster]

The hotly anticipated RTX 3080 video card when on sale this week, and most of the people who wanted to buy one
were unable to do so. You can thank bots like the one from Bounce Alerts that help resellers vacuum up stock for big product launches. This happens all the time, but it’s all the more frustrating when a product is in short supply, as it the case with the RTX 3080.

Customers who tried to purchase Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards found the Nvidia site to be unreliable. Even when they did
manage to get a GPU in their carts, they would be unable to complete the transaction. some of the resellers were gloating on Twitter.

Numerous Tweets mentioning Bounce Alerts claimed a dozen or more verified orders for the $699 video card.
Bounce Alerts uses “an automated script to run basically from the product page to payment information and then to checkout.” So, while you were tediously reloading the Nvidia store and trying to click buttons, a robot was doing it much, much faster.

The scalpers are paying Bounce Alerts $75 per month for access to its suite of tools, but the subscription pays for itself and then some. There are already listings for the 3080 on eBay for $1,200-2,000, a significant markup on the MSRP.
Not only is the card in demand, but the supply has been artificially constrained by people buying 42 cards at once.
Bounce Alerts says its members can rake in $25,000 in a single day by snapping up hard-to-find products.

Nvidia claims it has a policy of limiting purchases per customer, but it would appear Bounce Alerts found a workaround.
There’s no reason Nvidia should be sending 42 order confirmations to one email, that’s pretty clear evidence something
is up. Nvidia says it will go through and manually confirm orders, which we can only hope will cause these resellers to
lose their ill-gotten merchandise. It hasn’t been specific about what, if anything, it will do to prevent more bot orders
in the future. In the meantime, don’t buy overpriced video cards from resellers. As Nvidia will replenish the sto ks and Let's hope they stop this abuse.

 

[Bones]

Source(s)?
As long as greed is involved it's gonna be like this.

 

[Bubster]

It's Nvidia and third party manufacturers responsibility to organise the launch and be well stocked before so they will be no hoarding or speculation or shortages...

 

[claes]

Edit: Do not read this article, that treats bots as if they were traditional consumers. Please read the one linked in post #8.

Relevant:

How This German Skate Store Is SCAMMING Bot Users And Getting Away With It | The Sole Supplier

It's safe to assume that the sneaker community, in general, isn't a huge fan of bots. A piece of automated software used by many to purchase the hottest grails around, it makes copping manually an even harder task, since there's no way you can

thesolesupplier.co.uk

 

[Caring1]

Relevant:

How This German Skate Store Is SCAMMING Bot Users And Getting Away With It | The Sole Supplier

It's safe to assume that the sneaker community, in general, isn't a huge fan of bots. A piece of automated software used by many to purchase the hottest grails around, it makes copping manually an even harder task, since there's no way you can

thesolesupplier.co.uk

Not really relevant or accurate to say the store is "scamming" bot users as the description is clear.
Real people tend to read, but yes this is morally wrong for the innocents caught up.

 

[Arctucas]

Early adopters always get screwed, in more ways than one.

If I do end up buying a 30 series card, it will be next year.

 

[Fourstaff]

It's Nvidia and third party manufacturers to organise the launch and be well stocked before so they will be no hoarding or speculation or shortages...

And if they fail, we the consumers should wait for them to stock up instead of buying from scalpers.

 

[claes]

Not really relevant or accurate to say the store is "scamming" bot users as the description is clear.
Real people tend to read, but yes this is morally wrong for the innocents caught up.

My bad, I just posted the first Google result; that source is incredibly biased towards bot users, and seems to suggest that actual consumers were tricked.

Here's the article I had originally interacted with, which includes explanations from the seller. I mean, you'd have to be a bot or some other unintelligent being to think you're going to get a day-1 drop of some hypebeast shoes everyone expects to be out of stock for 60 euro below cost -- that's like clicking buy on a 3080 for $420 on launch day and expecting a 3080...

This Skate Shop Fooled Bots for the Parra x Nike SB Dunk ...

Bonkers skate shop in Frankfurt tricked bots buying the P...

solecollector.com

 

[Naito]

And if they fail, we the consumers should wait for them to stock up instead of buying from scalpers.

Yeah, but the FOMO is alive and well these days

 

[Space Lynx]

Was there even a captcha at checkout? If bots have figured out Captcha's why do we still have Captcha's....

 

[Rock N Roll Rebel]

my bad when I started my thread about bots I didn't know this thread existed sorry about that

 

[Space Lynx]

my bad when I started my thread about bots I didn't know this thread existed sorry about that

Do you know if the actual Nvidia store checkout had Captcha or not at checkout? It seems like a really bad oversight to not have Captcha... they knew the site would be overwhelmed...

 

[Rock N Roll Rebel]

I'm not sure I won't be buying my card tel February I want the 3090 it's going to take me that long to save up for it intel then I'll Be happy with my 1080 lol

 

[Bubster]

Early adopters always get screwed, in more ways than one.

If I do end up buying a 30 series card, it will be next year.

always a wise decision indeed. pascal are still good cards.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

So, Nvidia creates "the most powerful GPUs" that power AI systems and automated vehicles, but can't stop some shopping bots?

Yeah, but the FOMO is alive and well these days

I don't understand that, fear of missing out on some increased frame rates? It's not new content, it just provides the same content faster.... There's no fear of missing out, just epeen

P.S. - I'm not currently interested in buying an Nvidia card, but I'm always an advocate for consumers and can't stand profiteering resellers

 

[mouacyk]

I don't understand that, fear of missing out on some increased frame rates? It's not new content, it just provides the same content faster.... There's no fear of missing out, just epeen

no... fomo on epeen dude

 

[Caring1]

No FOMO, just people with a desire to be among the first with the latest and greatest new shiny thing.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

I'm not sure I won't be buying my card tel February I want the 3090 it's going to take me that long to save up for it intel then I'll Be happy with my 1080 lol

I don't see this happening with the RTX 3090 Since it's about double the price of RTX 3080. I think the price is what really drove this.

 

[robot zombie]

No FOMO, just people with a desire to be among the first with the latest and greatest new shiny thing.

I think their parents must've let them open all of their Christmas presents early every year.

I wonder what the legalities of stuff like this actually are. I have a feeling there's nothing to really grab at. It is still extremely shitty. Lots of outrage all over the net. Honestly, if anything needs to happen, Nvidia needs to up their game on detecting bots and maybe limit units sold by address. Nvidia did give some stock answers that frankly don't satisfy. Basically all they really did was go an try to manually delete bot orders... which is kiiinda laughable. They pretty much totally missed some basic measures that would have prevented or at least greatly reduced this.

GeForce RTX 3080 Launch: What Happened? You Asked, We Answered.

We address the top questions from the GeForce community.

www.nvidia.com

I just don't understand how they could be this naive, man. It's a pretty silly situation. The lack of transparent, specific answers hurts them here. People are still pissed. It's like they try to tell you what's going on, without actually getting to it.

Though I gotta say, I wonder how many of those reported bot purchases were legit. Like, how much of that was some kind of advertising for the botkits? How many of those ebay listings weren't actually totally fraudulent?

End of the day, still don't see the need to get it right away. I mean, if you can, great. If not, it's not THAT big of a deal to wait a bit, is it? I don't know. I guess it is, somebody has to be paying the scalpers. Anybody who does that really needs to work on themselves. It's not healthy to be THAT obsessed over buying something like this. The one thing I will say there is... they need to figure out how to stop this stuff now. The real problems come when it keeps happening.

This is kinda funny...

How a Bot Bought Dozens of RTX 3080 Units Before Consumers Could Grab Them

Based on a tweeted image, the bot was able to help one reseller score 42 units of the RTX 3080 from Nvidia’s website before it went out of stock.

uk.pcmag.com

But the admin for Bounce Alerts said consumers should blame the limited supplies on COVID-19 disrupting manufacturing in Asia.

“When given [the] chance, I’m sure most people would purchase more than 10+ units if they have the capital and look to make upwards of $25,000+ in one single day from [the] secondary market,” the admin said, later adding: “We hope they’re able to get on the next release!”

I'm chuckling, but they can still go die in a fire. Top-tier PR there.

 

[Birdito]

Fomo is the new BS term to screw people nowadays.

 

[moproblems99]

Though I gotta say, I wonder how many of those reported bot purchases were legit. Like, how much of that was some kind of advertising for the botkits? How many of those ebay listings weren't actually totally fraudulent?

If you can believe the pics of pallets of 3080s at mining farms days before releasing then a bunch were prepurchased.

 

[Hyderz]

i guess its the whole 20 series performance from 10 series was a bit of let down to alot of people and not to mention the price increase as well.
Then there is the introduction of ray tracing and the performance tanked even with the 2080ti costing over a thousand dollars.
A lot of people held out for the 30 series because the 20 series is a new tech and the rtx performance number shows.

Scalpers/bot are parasites in the consumer world, just look at when a concert ticket goes on sale and immediately sold out. Companies really need to address this problem.

Nvidia could have done better, they should have more in stock for launch. Also AIB partners are kept in dark about not getting a working drivers apart from a temperature software to see if the card would overheat etc. The drivers were to keep benchmarks from leaking onto the internet.
This is why the AIB only have the close to reference model out for example asus tuf, gigabyte gaming oc etc. The strix and other higher oc varients are yet to be seen.

 

[Rei]

Nvidia could have done better, they should have more in stock for launch.

Pretty sure the AIB partners would be more to blame for the lack of stock since they are the more popular cards to get. Regardless, nobody could have predicted this barrage of scalpers incident so this isn't really Nvidia nor the AIB partner's fault. Also would stocking up before launch possible or even a good idea considering the pandemic would reduce the number of output per month as well as reduced (non-scalpers) demanded for such high priced product. Sure, low SKUs resulted in reduced supply, but in hindsight, this can be viewed as a good thing in the long run as now scalper's attempt can (prolly & hopefully) be controlled.

So, Nvidia creates "the most powerful GPUs" that power AI systems and automated vehicles, but can't stop some shopping bots?

Pretty sure those AI are for vehicular automation, gaming & industrial-related tech, not for anti-shop bots. Also, Nvidia's store is prolly hit the least with bots compared to other online retail store, so Nvidia prolly can't help them.