#Newegg Makes Some PC Hardware Combos All-Or-Nothing with New Return Policy – Review Geek

For years, Newegg has bundled popular PC hardware components together with combined discounts. You could buy a bundle and return individual components, surrendering the combined discount but keeping the items you didn’t return. That’s no longer the case for some Newegg combo deals, thanks to a revised return policy: some combos can only be returned in full, all components included.

Some Newegg customers are steaming at this small revision, claiming that it’s designed to stick them with unwanted extra components while selling hard-to-find parts, like the latest NVIDIA RTX 3000-series graphics cards or competitive AMD processors. While that’s certainly a possibility (see retailers only selling game console “bundles” with overpriced accessories for something similar), there’s another explanation. Newegg may be trying to discourage scalpers from buying up huge amounts of parts at retail and selling them for inflated prices. Forcing scalpers to buy extra components would lower their profit margin and cost them extra time.

A Reddit user retrieved the original return policy from Archive.org, with no mention of requiring combo purchases to be returned in full unless the discount is greater than the price of the item returned. The new policy, now live on Newegg’s support site, adds the following:

Some combos are restricted from returning individual products for a refund and must be returned in their entirety. Please see combo product page for more specific information. 

Even with the aggressive combo deals in place, it looks like most or all of the new RTX 3000 cards are out of stock at Newegg—even when bundling them with other components only saves a dollar or two. Whether that’s a symptom of card manufacturers’ low stock or the efforts of greedy card scalpers, or a combination of the two, is impossible to determine from the outside.

Whatever the intention, reserving in-demand graphics cards for combo deals that include hardware customers may not want is bound to anger somebody, especially PC gamers who only need the one component for a powerful upgrade. Newegg’s solution to fight scalpers—or simply to inflate its own sales, depending on your interpretation—is inelegant at best.

Source: Hot Hardware