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Ask HN: Why don't Amazon, Target, Walmart implement product queueing?

1 points by cloudartisans ↗ HN
For products like hand sanitizer and masks, why can't there be orderly queues, with quotas, so that everyone can be treated fairly? As a software engineer, I find myself seriously considering writing scrapers to watch over the product pages and notify my wife when something is in stock. It's madness for her to be clicking a dozen pages throughout the day to try and "snag" a couple of these in-demand products.

It seems so easy to grab a couple of engineers and implement a rudimentary pre-order system (pretty sure they already have pre-ordering of some sort).

Anyone with the inside knowledge know what's going on? Is this a political issue?

6 comments

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PaulHoule
You mean I would go on the web site and say I want product X and then I have dibs on the Nth next one to be available, say three hours or three weeks later?
cloudartisans
Let's say I want this hand sanitizer:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01HEUD8YS

I should be able to purchase a quantity of 1-2, even if it's out of stock. I'm completely fine with being number 527,374 in line, but I want to be sure I will get it and only have to do this once. Instead of refreshing this page 20 times a day for a week, in hopes of hitting the several minutes when it becomes available and then inevitably sells out.

This is especially true for masks--impossible to be a good citizen and buy them, when there is no sane way of buying them and you have to jump through the hoops above.

I really don't want to write a scraper because it seems unethical, to get a "leg up" on the non-tech savvy people.

caryd
People would forget and abuse the return policy. Also, they constantly change prices so you would either get screwed or lock into a price the seller doesn't want to offer for a billion orders.
cloudartisans
I'd be ok with the changing prices--I use Amazon's subscribe and save, and the price fluctuations are reasonable. If memory serves, if the price is totally out of whack or the item is out of stock, I get a notification about it.

I've also never had to return a subscribe and save item, but I imagine if the policy was the same with these "pre-orders," there wouldn't be an issue, since subscribe and save has been in place for decades.

WheelsAtLarge
https://www.nowinstock.net/

This site does something similar to what you want.

cloudartisans
Thank you; for me, it's an ethical issue to use something like this. Some old lady who's not tech-savvy would "lose her spot" to me. I'd like to understand why the ecommerce giants can't institute a "fair for all" system.