what ever you do, dont blame the company for not making enough ...again....ha ha ha ha  
 

EVGATech_DanielM
 
Incorrect. Please be aware all websites are sold out of all models for various manufacturers. Trying to keep up with demand does not mean those companies have a disdain for their customers. 

I wouldn't call supplying 10 items to the only store (microcenter) for a metro of 2 million an attempt to keep up with demand.
 

ngaugler

EVGATech_DanielM
 
Incorrect. Please be aware all websites are sold out of all models for various manufacturers. Trying to keep up with demand does not mean those companies have a disdain for their customers. 

I wouldn't call supplying 10 items to the only store (microcenter) for a metro of 2 million an attempt to keep up with demand.
 

I don't even think either Microcenter in Georgia got that much stock..
 

ngaugler

EVGATech_DanielM
 
Incorrect. Please be aware all websites are sold out of all models for various manufacturers. Trying to keep up with demand does not mean those companies have a disdain for their customers. 

I wouldn't call supplying 10 items to the only store (microcenter) for a metro of 2 million an attempt to keep up with demand.
 

I would argue that a majority of those 2 million people did not wake up at 6 AM to buy a EVGA GPU, but I could be wrong.
 
http://www.evga.com/wheretobuy 


That is the list of retailers and distributors EVGA needs to fulfill. We would love to send a few hundred to each Microcenter, fact is, that's a very difficult thing to do. 
 

vgerik1234
So at a technical level here are two insights/ideas:

1. EVGA is hosted inside a physical datacenter and not a cloud provider (Azure, GCP, AWS)
   1. EVGA uses akamai as a webfront cache.
   2. Requests get forwarded from akamai to the datacenter for any non cached stuff.
      1. This is basically orders, actions, etc. Non static stuff
   3. Their one dedicated server rack now has to process everything coming in on top of the database has to handle it as well. No scaling is most likely possible since its physical location.
2.  EVGA is hosted in a cloud provider. 
   1. Same as 1.
   2. Same as 2, but is sent to the cloud provider.
   3. Servers can scale based on demand. HOWEVER, databases can't scale as well or efficiently as webservers.
      1. The database is what handles the requests for inventory, current cart objects, etc.
      2. If you have 1000 people adding an item to a cart, the DB now has to handle 1000 x N actions per person. Item in cart, number of item in cart, etc. 1 button press could realistically be 3+ db calls. Scaling becomes exponential.
      3. In general, it just becomes too expensive to invest in multi-master for a relatively small ecommerce site.
         1. It can cost THOUSANDS a month just for the database to be multi-master. So basically paying out the bum for no benefit expect 1 launch every year? Not financially viable.

So TLDR: It gets expensive real fast to handle on-demand scaling. I personally think EVGA most likely is in physical datacenter. This is VERY VERY common and a completely valid hosting decision.

If you're hitting a traditional RDMS you're not going to scale.  Cache all of your database entries and put your sessions / counters in RAM.  If memcache won't cut it look at CouchBase.  Works wonders when you don't have multiple data centers.  We're doing millions of transactions a second with this implementation.  Not a single request hits a RDMS even though our RDMS stores, what would be equivalent to, product data.   Work smarter, not harder.
 

the_Scarlet_one
Bots aren’t the issue. You may as well stop feed that rumor mill.

I disagree...completely.
 
Depends on your definition of a bot.

Regardless, the fact that I can get a card in my cart, and not be able to make it thru payment before it's 'sold' is ludicrous.
 
Once the card is in my cart it should be mine (Just like brick and mortar stores) for at least 10 minutes.
 
 

EVGATech_DanielM

vgerik1234

EVGATech_DanielM
 
Every single order is vetted and verified to be actual human beings. Anything that looks out of the ordinary is cancelled and refunded. You are one of thousands who have attempted to get a card at launch. 
 

Would it be safe to assume you guys have metrics on stuff like time to order, time to check out, time item sitting in cart, etc? And that is how you vet if it was human or not? Or 'no comment' to keep the method of verifying a secret. Totally understand if that is the case.

Well, putting a item in the cart does not reserve the product from our stock. We absolutely have the data to see what time frame it takes for a person to check out but with launches and sales, the crush of traffic some times skews those numbers. We review all orders that are placed and each are verified by the accounting team. I wish I could provide more information but I can tell you newer accounts are scrutinized more than accounts that have a standing history in regards to orders. If an order looks off, we will cancel it and require the customer to call in from the billing to verify information on the order. 

1) Vetted by whom?
 
2) It should reserve it, just like a brick and mortar store, for 10 minutes. It's asinine to be able to get it in my cart but not be able to get thru the check out process before someones 'bot' (1password) fills in all the info
and submits it. No, I shouldn't have to use 1password which I don't trust to do the same.
 

Best buy and all the other sites had same issues...B&H still crashing...its just too much traffic, not enough supply. As long as they dont raise prices due to hype, ill just wait for next batch...any ideas when? :)

Ciddharthas
Daniel, do you know if the ftw ultra actually went on sale and sold out today, or is the product listing that says "sold out" just a placeholder until that model becomes available due to delays?

Just a placeholder. No FTW3 were sold. We wanted to at least put up the pages for when they launch. Jacob on Twitter will usually give the heads up when that launches :)

EVGATech_DanielM

Ciddharthas
Daniel, do you know if the ftw ultra actually went on sale and sold out today, or is the product listing that says "sold out" just a placeholder until that model becomes available due to delays?

Just a placeholder. No FTW3 were sold. We wanted to at least put up the pages for when they launch. Jacob on Twitter will usually give the heads up when that launches :)

Thanks for the confirmation.  Any chance he'll give a heads-up *before* it launches with a date/time so we'll know ahead of time?

transdogmifier

the_Scarlet_one
Bots aren’t the issue. You may as well stop feed that rumor mill.

I disagree...completely.
 
Depends on your definition of a bot.

Regardless, the fact that I can get a card in my cart, and not be able to make it thru payment before it's 'sold' is ludicrous.
 
Once the card is in my cart it should be mine (Just like brick and mortar stores) for at least 10 minutes.
 
 

Brother I was in the line for 2 hours.. 10 mins would not have cut it.  It is what it is.. I got all the way past the shipping part.. Into the payment and then got the dreaded sold out.. But it took like 2 hours.. The things were sold out most likely 10 mins after it went into my cart, and was still waiting.
 
Sucks.. But we will get them eventually...

vgerik1234
Oh yeah, we build using mongo and redis all the time. Relatively cheap versus RDMS multi-master and scales insanely well. However, I am just speaking on what information I can find via browser requests and file types evga serves. I don't think EVGA has had a website 2.0 launch ever. Its very hard to migrate away from ASP, hell even going to .net core is a challenge. 

I don't think an international company, who is a leader in their industry, should accept mediocrity on their one and only company owned, direct to consumer, presence.  Traditional brick and mortar or e-commerce.   EVGA if you want to fix this, you got my contact info.

There was a reddit post where a guy had a picture of the MSI 3080 he got at Micro Center.  He arrived at 5pm yesterday and waited...  Half an hour before "opening time" the manager came out and said they had 12 (yes twelve) 3080's.  10 of them were EVGA (no other info on models) and 2 were MSI.  They gave the first 12 people in line a voucher and let them go into the store early.
 
The Poster didn't say how many people had been waiting before the 12 number announcement.  So there were obviously limited quantities... I know some Micro Centers got more than 12 and some got less.  None are in my area regardless.
 
I was on Newegg, Nvidia and EVGA this morning... Newegg simply took a dump just before 9am (at least for me).  EVGA was slow to just gone and then back to slow.  Nvidia never slowed down for me (the forums there crashed for a while) but their stock went from "auto notify" to "sold out" with nothing in between for me.  So I'm not sure how that worked exactly...
 
Oh and my guess is the max listing number on Ebay will exceed the number of cards that were actually available world wide.  Without knowing how many of those listings have no card available.. the total number of listings is kind of just non sense right along with the prices.

EVGATech_DanielM

vgerik1234

EVGATech_DanielM
 
Every single order is vetted and verified to be actual human beings. Anything that looks out of the ordinary is cancelled and refunded. You are one of thousands who have attempted to get a card at launch. 
 

Would it be safe to assume you guys have metrics on stuff like time to order, time to check out, time item sitting in cart, etc? And that is how you vet if it was human or not? Or 'no comment' to keep the method of verifying a secret. Totally understand if that is the case.

Well, putting a item in the cart does not reserve the product from our stock. We absolutely have the data to see what time frame it takes for a person to check out but with launches and sales, the crush of traffic some times skews those numbers. We review all orders that are placed and each are verified by the accounting team. I wish I could provide more information but I can tell you newer accounts are scrutinized more than accounts that have a standing history in regards to orders. If an order looks off, we will cancel it and require the customer to call in from the billing to verify information on the order. 

This craziness that bots took everything is obviously silly, as it's obvious some regular Joes managed to snag one, and there were very real, rational issues like server stability and limited stock. However, on the flip side, and with all due respect, I'm not sure you understand why people might want to use bots. There isn't a machine revolution trying to get GPU power or something, it's usually a human who use scripts to help give them an advantage so they can attempt purchases at multiple stores at the same time faster than most people. If the heart of your investigations is simply gut feelings about something being off and/or verifying there's a human on the other, then it's not really doing anything. Someone will obviously reply, or hand wave it and say they were just quick. Something like captcha is designed to prevent automated processes from successfully ever getting to the end and tend to be very effective from my limited understanding. A lot of limited edition-type stuff elsewhere - like sneakers - often use stuff exactly like captcha (among other similar systems, and some backend ones I hear) to prevent this exactly, and it's become kind of joke that the difficulty of some of those is what keeps people from getting their limited edition whatever.
 
But I've never seen any general tech merchant ever adopt this, so eh, and I guess I can't expect a place like the EVGA store or Newegg to be specialized for the handling of limited stock like what you see with the constant fight from vendors against ticket scalpers and limited sneaker hoarders, etc.

I got the FTW3 ultra into cart , but all the sudden it was out of stock, oh well a great excuse to get the 3090 on the 24th, 😬🤣😂🤣