There’s been a lot of discussion from disgruntled PlayStation 5 purchasers on Reddit, who’ve been awaiting their orders from Costco. Many people took advantage of a bundle featuring the console, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and a 1-month PS Now membership on 18th November, but many orders never shipped. That appears to be because the retailer oversold its allocation.
According to one Twitter account that specialises on gaming deals and console stock, as corroborated by several other Reddit users, Costco’s customer service team has admitted it sold more units than it could fulfil. The good news is that it’s honouring any purchase with a tracking number, it’s just awaiting another shipment of PS5 stock within the next five to eight business days.
So, it’s not the worst possible news. Costco is committed to fulfilling the orders it’s taken – unlike Kohl’s, you may recall – and it seems that new supply is due within the next couple of weeks. That means if you don’t have an order yet, you should keep a close eye on our PS5 stock guide for more updates and information on that front. And if you did checkout at Costco, just check you’ve got a tracking number.
[source reddit.com]
Comments 11
How difficult is it to have a system and tell it you have a set amount of stock, then it can only sell that amount?
Very have cancelled a lot of orders, orders they suspected as being placed by scalpers, but it would appear some innocent and genuine customers have also got caught in their wide ranging net.
No consolation to the innocent but, assuring to see a retailer taking a stand... at last.
@carlos82 only a literal wizard could conjure up such a system, you speak of magic, this is not possible
@Woogy yes, I have a friend who bought 3 consoles for family and friends, luckily no cancellations
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi
Sure "family"
A ton of launch day orders are part of this mess as well. Read the subreddit you cited.
Yeah, people complain about GameStop all the time, but I got my PS5 just fine from them. I pre-ordered it and got in the morning the day it launched. Clean and simple with good service.
@Gaming365247 yes, quite literally family, a nephew and a friend, what a bizarre unfounded and insinuated accusation, choosing absolute cinycissm in this matter... I give up
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi @carlos82
To be fair it's difficult to ensure an exact number of orders in a distributed system without losing the high availability/high throughput you design said distributed system for… but it's not an impossible problem. It's just a case of a system designed for one use case (handing huge numbers of customers ordering a wide range of items you have a high stock of) coming up against the expectation that it can handle another (handing huge numbers of customers ordering the same two items, of which you have limited stock). What will have happened is that there were multiple transactions happening between stock checks with no way of synchronising them.
You will have an plenty of sites where the alternative approach was taken, and that sites were unable to maintain acceptable performance, potentially failing to complete handling of an order, or just being so slow as to provide users no feedback until they go to check out and find that the item is no longer in stock.
Scale is a hard problem.
I once went to a book signing at Costco in Thurrock and met Shane Richie who signed his autobiography From Rags to Richie for me and shook my hand.
@Gaming365247 Yawn.
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