Getting hold of the latest and greatest graphics card is almost always a challenge, thanks to scalpers, and the recent market hasn't been much different. Users are eager to get their hands on the new RTX 5000 and RX 9000 series GPUs, but finding a readily available supply is far from typical.
However, Damien Mason over at Club386 has noticed one vendor taking steps to manage their GPU supply in a way that directly impacts scalpers' ability to swoop in and raid available stock. Amazon has a handful of product listings reserving various RTX 5000 and RX 9000 GPUs and prebuilt PC's with these cards as exclusive items for Amazon Prime members.
This isn't true for every listing that features these cards but it is the case for a few. If you are logged into an Amazon Prime account, you probably wouldn't be wise to the situation, as there is no indication on the product pages that these products are exclusives.
However, if you find them while signed out or logged into an account with an Amazon Prime membership, you'll notice a tag that says "Exclusively for Prime Members" on the product search page. And the product listing includes a button to join Amazon Prime, rather than add the item to your cart.
We've been covering the scalping situation, so it's interesting to see a vendor as large as Amazon offering a path for sellers to take, which would mitigate the issue. Some resellers have listed AMD RX 9000 series GPUs for as much as $2,000 (USD), while system integrators have seen RTX 5000 series GPUs offered for up to $3,000 (USD).
We took the opportunity to explore this claim for ourselves and were able to confirm listings for both GPUs and prebuilt PCs featuring these graphics cards that were labeled as Amazon Prime exclusives when accessing the product pages from outside of a Prime membership account.
It's important to note that Amazon has not officially declared this implementation as a tactic for combating scalpers, but it's hard not to see it that way. Then again, if scapling continues to be profitable, we're sure that resellers can afford their own Amazon Prime accounts.
