Hello,
This morning at 6am, I attempted to order an NVIDIA RTX 3070 graphics card, when they were released. I expected high demand and so I was ready at release time, and despite a few glitches with the "extra step" that was required, I did finally get a card into my shopping cart to begin checkout. The popup notice about the "extra step" was clear that once you had the product in your cart, it would be held for your checkout process.
However, once I began the checkout process, I ended up stuck - the checkout page indicated that the product was not available for either shipping or store pickup; in other words, I supposedly had a card reserved but the checkout dialog didn't recognize there was any way to get it to me... so it wouldn't let me check out. I assume this was because the first "wave" of cards released had sold out by this point.
While fighting with this, in another tab I watched the card become sold out, and then become available again as another wave of them were made available. However, attempting to grab one of this next wave was impossible, because the website notified me that there was a limit of one per customer and I already had one in my cart! I was pretty hesitant to clear my cart since the website was clear that once you had one in your cart you had "secured" it, so by the time I tried that, the next (and apparently last) wave of cards had sold out as well.
Thus, it appears that I missed out on getting one of these cards not due to bad luck of them selling out before I ordered one, but due to technical problems with the BestBuy online checkout process. I do have a screenshot of the card in my cart.
I then attempted to talk to a customer service rep on the phone about this. Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one calling about these issues, and I'm sympathetic to the fact that the CS reps get burned out on hearing person after person with the same complaint - anyone would. But despite the fact that I tried to explain (very politely) several times that my problem was related to issues with the checkout process, all the rep kept repeating was "they're sold out." When I realized we weren't getting anywhere and asked (again politely) to be escalated to the next level of support, the line went dead.
I've already seen another post about a similar issue on this board, and I'll echo his question: what is BestBuy planning to do to make this right?
Please let me know if/where I can provide additional information, the screenshot of the card in my cart etc.
Thank you,
Joe