Newegg faces some additional changes for its customer service practices after facing backlash last month. As of now, the retailer appears to have taken its Newegg Shuffle drawing system offline. Since February 22, the event hasn’t been held. There has been no Newegg Shuffle since February 22.While you will find different items in the Newegg Shuffle, the hottest devices that seem to be featured are the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series, AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5.
A Newegg Shuffle hasn’t been held since February 22. One week after Newegg’s customer service issues were uncovered, the date was just one week after. The company updated its hassle-free return policy to cover all categories of open-box products. The Shuffle program has been criticized before, but it’s worth noting that they’re not directly connected. Although Newegg bills the Shuffle as a more democratic way to get hot-selling items into customers’ hands, many customers and commenters have complained that the Shuffle includes excessive bundle offers (such as monitors, motherboards, and SSDs).
Luck Of the Draw
In the beginning, Newegg Shuffle’s purpose was to keep PS5 consoles away from scalpers who were purchasing stock and then reselling it online at a massively inflated price to make a profit. Still, it was quickly expanded to include other hardware with the same issues.
As PCMag reports, an average of 100,000 people enter each raffle in the Newegg Shuffle, making it unsurprising that most of them are unsuccessful. Through a loophole discovered by Florida resident Ricardo Santana Jr, Santana was able to circumvent the entire lottery process using the Newegg ‘Build your PC’ feature, which allows you to select components for a custom gaming desktop PC digitally.
Santana took advantage of a glitch in the system that allowed him to buy thousands of tickets for the raffle without winning anything. He then proceeded to wait for the draw to take place and win a prize of $250,000 after the Newegg staff discovered the glitch. Newegg has responded to the situation by offering refunds to all participants who purchased tickets through the Build Your PC feature and those who purchased tickets through other means. The company has also taken steps to prevent such a loophole, including blocking the ability to purchase tickets using credit cards. The only option left is to send cash via mail or PayPal, which seems like an odd decision for a company that claims to be a leader in online shopping. In a statement, Newegg CEO Don Mattrick said: “We were made aware of this issue today and immediately began an investigation.
Just Let People Enjoy Things
In the beginning, I thought, “What on earth would an 11-year-old boy need an RTX 3090 for?” but in the end, good for them. It appears that a few other purchases were made before the workaround was fixed, hopefully by gamers rather than those looking to make a profit. There are no hard feelings between Newegg and the family who found the loophole.
During a recent interview with PCMag, Santana Sr said it’s a terrible thing to have to go to such a length in order to get these cards, a sentiment that has been frustrating PC gamers and designers for months now. Recent news indicates we may start to see GPUs on the shelves at an affordable price and with enough inventory to go around, but when we see the benefits of the falling crypto mining market is anyone’s guess. While I’m waiting for a similar slice of success to be shared with us, I will take these happy stories when they appear in the ongoing storm of depressing news over hardware shortages.
