Customers place lots of orders on the Geforce RTX 3000 series

Anyone who wants a graphics card of the latest cut must be prepared to wait for weeks or even months, and then pay prices well above AMD’s and Nvidia’s recommended. The unprecedented situation has given rise to one of SweClocker’s biggest threads of all time, but also to eager customers placing lots of orders.

Swedish retailers are now testifying that willing consumers are placing orders like never before. There are many examples of customer numbers that have placed dozens of orders, often on virtually every listed graphics card, especially from Nvidia. This is not necessarily a specific Geforce graphics card, but one and the same customer can have orders for each model of RTX 3090, RTX 3080, RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti.

The behavior is simply about standing in as many queues as possible at the same time, hoping to get a graphics card – regardless of performance class – when they enter stock. Once a customer has received a graphics card, it is not a matter of course that they cancel their other orders, which in many cases count in the tens.

By all accounts, it is not a matter of systematically buying as many graphics cards as possible and selling at a higher price on the secondary market, but that the customer in question simply forgets to cancel orders. This according to a retailer who has done random sampling and contacted customers, who in practically all cases agreed to remove orders. There is also a thesis that the customers who place a large number of orders with one retailer do so with several, something which, however, cannot be confirmed.

Of course, the phenomenon does not affect availability as the number of customers who want to buy a graphics card still far exceeds the number of graphics cards on the market. However, it has other consequences, such as the fact that the queues in some cases look longer than they actually are. At the same time, there is concern about a “ketchup effect” in the event of ice melting and graphics cards starting to be delivered in larger volumes.

As a number of retailers allow orders without prepayment, individual customers can receive emails that they have several graphics cards to pick up. Only after a number of days is a product canceled automatically, after which it is passed on to the next. With many customers in line who forget to cancel, this can lead to extended waiting times for those at the back.

A potentially worse scenario for both retailers and other fellow customers are those who ordered on invoice, and chose home delivery. In cases where graphics cards may remain with agents before they are automatically sent back to the dealer, the time of the graphics cards in limbo would not be counted in days, but in weeks. There is currently no concrete solution on how to avoid this, apart from manually handling and contacting each customer who has placed several orders.

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