Newegg has sold combo deals for years now on computer components, and now you pretty much have to buy a combo deal if you plan on scoring a new GPU. However, when you bought a combo deal in the past, you could return some of the items you bought in a combo package deal instead of returning the entire order. As reported by HotHardware, Newegg has now enacted a new policy that certain combo deals have to be returned in their entirety.
Interestingly, this applies to all the graphics card deals we've seen on Newegg. To help combat bots and scalpers, Newegg has put most of its latest graphics card inventory into bundle deals to hopefully keep as many GPUs as possible in consumers' hands instead of in the hands of scalpers. Unfortunately, this didn't work too well in the past, as scalpers could simply return the unnecessary products and keep the graphics card. This new policy should give scalpers less incentive to buy new GPUs simply because they have to keep all the products in the combo deal.
But the new policy can also hurt regular customers, many of whom used Newegg's old refund/return policy to get the graphics cards they wanted and return the remaining product(s) they didn't need. That is no longer an option, so customers now have to keep the extra product they bought in the graphics card combo deal.
For Newegg, offering combo deals to fend off scalpers is a double-edged sword, as it could anger its regular customers, too. But perhaps there are better ways to prevent scalpers from getting your products; MicroCenter, for example, requires an ID and limits the number of GPUs that one customer can acquire per month. Hopefully, Newegg can implement a better system in the future, but for now, regular customers are turning out to be collateral damage in the retailer's war with the scalpers.
