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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why this is so hard for retailers to figure out. Valve has an excellent system. Let me give you a down payment, five dollars, ten, whatever. Put my name on a list and when its my turn to buy give me a few days to purchase, and if not refund and move on to the next person.

It's like all these retailers forgot backordering was a thing.

They could even store the address and limit to one order per x period of time.

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Yeah, this has been really frustrating for me, too. I've been trying to buy a Compute Module 4, and everyone is sold out of that as well. I'd be perfectly happy to even pay the full price to place a backorder, and just wait for them to ship it to me whenever my order hits the top of the list. I don't want to keep checking daily to see if anyone has something, and then click through to each of 5 different retailers to only find out that they've sold out again in the time it's taken me to click through. It's such a waste of time.

As far as I know, you can place a backorder with Newark or Allied.

Just put an order with a 70 week wait with Newark

They even confirmed manually via email if I really really really wanted to place the backorder

Ah, thanks! For some reason I'd missed that last time I looked. The other 4 retailers listed on raspberrypi.com for the US don't appear to accept preorders, but you're right about Newark.

Now I just need to wait until October for my CM4 to ship... :(

Or increase the price for the bots detected to a few thousand dollars

Hah, I love the idea of doing this. Detect a bot, change the price and put a big banner up that says “hey, human, click here to pay $40 instead of $4000”. Only works once or twice before bots would catch on and check the price, but I bet a ton of auto-order bots don’t currently.

Then write it up and get that sweet HN karma for defending the Pi supply.

I mean, the text could be changed, also if KNOWN bots are detected, it won't matter. Assuming you KNOW they are bots, give them the new price with no hints at all. :D

Retailer gets paid whether it’s you or someone else buying. Why invest in system upgrades?

Why not sell them directly on the secondary market and pocket the markup?

Why even bother selling them yourself and cultivate a community of scalper to maximize profit and take a cut.

Then buy the suppliers and only make enough to keep them scarce and expensive.

Don't stop there, buy competitor wares and put them in the landfill since they aren't running any schemes.

I think it boils down to: profit isn't the only motivation for doing a thing.

Hey, do you work for ticketmaster?

Network Solutions is my guess

Ticketmaster was definitely my inspiration.

Because unlike in your head, the real world has costs for erecting a logistics pipeline.

Diverting from the pipeline that works for them is in your interest not theirs.

First world whiners; this graphics card QQing is approaching “I can’t get a haircut.” levels of cringe. HN thinks it’s so much more respectable and mature than Reddit, though. Still a bunch of first worlders moaning about reality not serving them just so.

This is how your culture has always worked; any one of us is not especially important to it. You want to roll that way? Put up a website to do so, work a deal with nVidia or AMD to be that pipeline.

Are you on HN? Are you making a point? It appears you should check the mirror for whiners.

Not sure what this is in reply to, my post answers why a person may do something with no profit. Not everyone is an asshole.

Not sure what this is in reply to, but the graphics card companies operate on profit. The retailers operate on profit. Hosting services requires paying for them.

You want someone else to do what you aren’t. That’s not how it works. Prove its worth on the market.

I’m not saying that’s ideal, I’m saying that’s how it’s done, not through hoping and dreaming in the nooks and crannies of social media

The only thing I want in this context is for you to understand people have motivations that are not solely based on profits.

You having continuity for two posts in a row would be a nice-to-have though.

Ticket scalpers use pools of credit cards to make purchases. What's to stop botters from using pools of CCs+phone numbers?

Unique shipping addresses are typically harder to circumvent (but not impossible)

I think you could just make up unit/apartment numbers to make your address look different? I know USPS provides an address validation service[0], but it apparently only understands street addresses and not whether there is a single family home there, or a 10,000 unit megacondo

[0] https://www.ups.com/address_validator/search?loc=en_US

How many people in the same mega-condo are trying to order Raspberry Pis though? Ignoring unit numbers would still probably be worth the small amount of collateral damage.

I actually worked on a service for a company in the past that could identify these types of scenarios and determine if they are fake.

There were a number of scenarios to consider (there was a "probability score" involved), but the biggest one is: "How big is the plot of land at address XYZ. Is it in an urban, suburban, or rural area? Is the existing building a house, commercial building, or skyscraper? Does this unit buy products of this type in bulk?"

Easier than you think. Note that the score had hundreds of factors. These were the easiest to consider.

(In most states, you could pull public info and tell right away if an address has multiple legitimate units or not FYI)

I'm curious how you handled addresses that couldn't be validated. From my perspective, that's a big blind spot of real-world implementations of this sort of stuff, and thus the condition under which most of it happens. Not quite "make up a unit number" (freight forwarder red flag, anyway) but pretty close.

If you use the USPS API, it gives you a specific message if it's a multi-unit address:

Default address: The address you entered was found but more information is needed (such as an apartment, suite, or box number) to match to a specific address.

Verify API, page 11

https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/general-api-dev...

CPC are a major supplier and accept backorders - https://cpc.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/rpi4-modbp-4gb/raspberr...

I ordered a RPi CM4 about 5 months ago. They charged me the full price and I’m still waiting for the delivery.

Bots then buy them up?? Back ordering has the same problem as everything else that is first come first serve.

My fav thing is combining “purchase intent” with “has bought at store before” and just allowing people with purchase histories at the store to buy, and 1 per person.

Also just lotteries work alright, if only cuz you add enough weird friction to make it rough.

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