Zotac Website Glitch Charges Up to $1,000 to Ship Nvidia RTX 3050
If you tried to buy Nvidia’s RTX 3050 graphics card from Zotac on launch day, you may have stopped when you saw the final checkout price.
A glitch on Zotac’s website briefly caused the shipping prices for the RTX 3050 to range from $115 to more than $1,000, or double the cost of the actual GPU.
We saw this play out today when Zotac began offering the Gaming GeForce RTX 3050 Twin Edge OC for $399 around 9 a.m. EST. The card was actually in stock, unlike the more affordable $249 version, which seems to have sold out in minutes.
But during the checkout process, we noticed the eye-popping delivery cost to send the GPU to California. Zotac was asking us to pay $115 for ground-shipping, $298 for three-day select, and up to $1,025 for next-day air delivery.
Costs only went up if you changed your address location to the East Coast. For Florida, Zotac was asking $166 to send the GPU via ground-shipping and nearly $1,400 for next-day air.
Fortunately, the error seems to have been a glitch. By 9:30 a.m., the website was showing more reasonable delivery rates with ground shipping at around $30. But still, the glitch probably prevented some consumers from ordering the RTX 3050 from Zotac on Thursday.
At around 9:45 a.m., the $399 model finally sold out on the vendor’s website. If you’re still looking for the RTX 3050, your best bet is to try Newegg’s Shuffle system, which is giving consumers from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST to enter the lottery to obtain the GPU.
Newegg Shuffle is offering 10 models ranging in price from $249 to $489. The retailer will pick winners in the afternoon, who will be given a chance to buy the products before the day ends.
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