GW Stock / IT System Issues

[Matcap86]

Aaand there goes the site again... US preorder going up?

[Noserenda]

Yeah UK site is down still, just thought I'd take a gander after the morning madness!

[WrathOfTheLion]

28 minutes ago, matcap86 said:

Aaand there goes the site again... US preorder going up?

US isn't up for 4.5 hours or so from now.

[Matcap86]

6 minutes ago, WrathOfTheLion said:

US isn't up for 4.5 hours or so from now.

 

Huh weird that the site is having issues now. 

[Lord Marshal]

Apparently copies going for over £300 are already selling. I can't even blame scalpers at this point at those prices. 

 

This whole mess is why I'm glad I never bothered trying to 'collect' the CEs. Mind you, with how fast standard hardbacks from BL sell out these days they're practically collectors editions themselves. 

 

Edited February 18, 2023 by Lord Marshal

[m_r_parker]

52 minutes ago, Lord Marshal said:

Apparently copies going for over £300 are already selling. I can't even blame scalpers at this point at those prices. 

 

£300, nah - more than that. Just had a look on eBay at the completed ones, here are some of the top prices that have ALREADY sold…

 

[Matcap86]

83 copies on there already, just despicable. 

[Lord Marshal]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. It wasn't four years ago that a lot of the collector's editions took months to sell. The Warmaster, Corax and Jaghatai you could buy literally a year later.

 

I have no idea what has changed unless scalpers really are buying 95% of the stock and/or a FOMO switch got flipped to overdrive. Sure, The Horus Heresy is popular but just about every other CE is going within the hour and more often minutes.

 

 

Edited February 18, 2023 by Lord Marshal

[alfred_the_great]

27 minutes ago, Lord Marshal said:

I've said it before and I'll say it again. It wasn't four years ago that a lot of the collector's editions took months to sell. The Warmaster, Corax and Jaghatai you could buy literally a year later.

 

I have no idea what has changed unless scalpers really are buying 95% of the stock and/or a FOMO switch got flipped to overdrive. Sure, The Horus Heresy is popular but just about every other CE is going within the hour and more often minutes.

 

 

I’m willing to bet like anything on the internet right now, it’s scalpers and their bots. 
 

just look at the Taylor Swift or Glastonbury sales. 

[Valkyrion]

I don't know how possible such a system would be to implement, but could GW offer those who have bought previous Collectors Editions from GW direct first crack at any future ones? 

At least that way if they still sell out they have at least been sold to a collector, rather than scalper, even if said collector then scalps their copy. It can't be botted, at least.

[Fire Golem]

29 minutes ago, Valkyrion said:

I don't know how possible such a system would be to implement, but could GW offer those who have bought previous Collectors Editions from GW direct first crack at any future ones? 

At least that way if they still sell out they have at least been sold to a collector, rather than scalper, even if said collector then scalps their copy. It can't be botted, at least.

I’ve suggested that to them before. 

[Cleon]

I've got no interest in playing 'fight the bots' every release so haven't looked at any limited edition books for years, but if they did a 'register for the series, get a first refusal on a limited edition for each one then it'd be something I'd consider again.

[Shield-Captain]

Made it all the way to the checkout page and then it crashed for the US site. First LE I won’t get

[quasistellar]

Weird thing happened where when I was checking out, where the deliver to store or deliver to address options were, it said "deliver to your address in the UK".

 

My address is US and I'm on the US store and everything was in dollars. Site crashed anyway so I guess I'll never know what the deal was with that lol

[Alpharius902]

Trying to get First Founding and the website crashed. Surely it'll still be there, surely

[Halandaar]

Not sure how GW solves this problem; they finally implemented a 1-per-customer rule and they've still all gone on eBay. So is it people with multiple accounts? If so how do you stop that? 1 copy per delivery address even if it's multiple accounts that bought them? Even that can be gotten around to an extent, just seems like unless you come up with a pretty convoluted way of manually allocating books to buyers it's always going to be a problem.

 

The other thing though, is it even organised scalpers or just a lot of individual buyers taking a chance? I mean £400 profit for two minutes work makes it so appealing that probably even people who wouldn't normally do that sort of thing went after a copy. Frankly if I'd known people were genuinely prepared to pay £500 I might even have been tempted to try it myself, you can hardly blame people when that amount of money is involved. The people paying the prices have just as much to answer for as the people buying to re-sell, imo.

[RWJP]

As I've seen a few comments implying this whole debacle is somehow part of GW actively trying to screw over independent retailers, I thought this would be relevant: https://www.facebook.com/WarhammerPoole/posts/pfbid02hpT3Ze2LLh443WNF1aRamnUPFo5Jh2PNBTyLxaLYtToY6UNeKmWvoY8mRpbmfeCPl

This is my local actual GW store reporting:

* They haven't received all of their allocation of this weeks's new releases
* They haven't received their normal weekly re-stock
* They haven't received the mail orders from the in store terminal
* They haven't received the free sample novels for the BL Weekend

It's clear that this issue is far more significant than GW "attacking FLGS" or anything like that.

[Noserenda]

They clearly need to do a Print on demand run to accurately guage interest, that and somehow boost their website capacity on big multi release days, after all 10th ed is coming soon...

[RWJP]

8 minutes ago, Halandaar said:

Not sure how GW solves this problem; they finally implemented a 1-per-customer rule and they've still all gone on eBay. So is it people with multiple accounts? If so how do you stop that? 1 copy per delivery address even if it's multiple accounts that bought them? Even that can be gotten around to an extent, just seems like unless you come up with a pretty convoluted way of manually allocating books to buyers it's always going to be a problem.

 

The other thing though, is it even organised scalpers or just a lot of individual buyers taking a chance? I mean £400 profit for two minutes work makes it so appealing that probably even people who wouldn't normally do that sort of thing went after a copy. Frankly if I'd known people were genuinely prepared to pay £500 I might even have been tempted to try it myself, you can hardly blame people when that amount of money is involved. The people paying the prices have just as much to answer for as the people buying to re-sell, imo.

It would probably need to be a combination of all of the above. You effectively would need to create a unique identifier of Name + Address + Email Address + Payment Method and only ship 1 copy to that identifier. If any order comes in with a match to any part (eg from the same payment method but different name and address) it would need to be rejected.

I also totally agree with your last point. If people stopped paying the scalpers, the scalpers would stop scalping. No GW product, even a fancy limited edition book) is worth spending several times retail price... Even if you have the other 4 out of 5 books in a set or whatever, it's still not worth it. 

[Djangomatic82]

They could probably implement something like a repeat customers club. Make 2 tiers of items in the web store. Tier 1 is all the regular stuff people that actually play, paint and collect the hobby buy. Tier 2 is all the FOMO items that GW puts out. Make Tier 2 accessible only to accounts that have "X" discreet purchases, or dollars spent or whatever of Tier 1 items in the preceding 12 months. Scalpers and resellers by the nature of just trying to flip high margin FOMO items probably wont ever meet the standard of buying Tier 1 items to a degree to qualify for Tier 2 items.

Edit: maybe someway of including the independents into this too, LFG's are good for all of us.

Edited February 18, 2023 by Djangomatic82

[fudblinker]

I got screwed over with the site going down as I was clicking checkout and just kept timing out. This is just ridiculous… I’ve gotten all of the rest of the books and look at either an incomplete collection and or bending to paying insane scalper mark up.

[01RTB01]

1 hour ago, fudblinker said:

I got screwed over with the site going down as I was clicking checkout and just kept timing out. This is just ridiculous… I’ve gotten all of the rest of the books and look at either an incomplete collection and or bending to paying insane scalper mark up.

Facebook loot group may be able to help you out. It's an anti scalping group

[Redcomet]

3 hours ago, Djangomatic82 said:

They could probably implement something like a repeat customers club. Make 2 tiers of items in the web store. Tier 1 is all the regular stuff people that actually play, paint and collect the hobby buy. Tier 2 is all the FOMO items that GW puts out. Make Tier 2 accessible only to accounts that have "X" discreet purchases, or dollars spent or whatever of Tier 1 items in the preceding 12 months. Scalpers and resellers by the nature of just trying to flip high margin FOMO items probably wont ever meet the standard of buying Tier 1 items to a degree to qualify for Tier 2 items.

Edit: maybe someway of including the independents into this too, LFG's are good for all of us.

This is a ridiculous idea. 
 

Either make more, make a POD system for these books a couple of months in advance, or however long their supply chain needs, or add a queue system and a “I am a human” thingy at checkout to make it as hard for the scalpers as possible 

[MegaVolt87]

There needs to be earlier pre order windows for CE stuff. People who want it can get it, scalpers have less incentive to vacuum up the stock. But X numbered copies also has to stop also which helps. 

[Kastor Krieg]

I've long given up on any LE from GW. Not worth the FOMO stress and the hassle. Hardbacks are my LEs, paperbacks are my regular releases. That's it.