It makes me wonder if online ordering needs to have some changes made to better facilitate the user experience. The problem is that a lot of sites just have a mostly decoupled cart-inventory system, which means adding an item to your cart has no tie to actual inventory apart from having it in your cart means it isn't sold out. This is quite different from a physical store where you typically have the item or some physical representation of it (a ticket). I have seen some sites that have carts with timers, but those are largely stores selling digital products.
However, the one problem that comes to mind would be stock squatting; adding items to your cart to hold onto them. How can you stop this sort of thing? To some degree, I think Sony had an interesting idea if it was a bit flawed. Sony required you to express interest in the console, and they would choose people that would receive a pre-order chance. This sort of system can help you weed out fresh bot accounts, but you can also leave out legitimate users. For example, I requested a pre-order from Sony and never heard anything even though my PSN account is quite old and I've had numerous consoles on my account.
Sounds like the words of someone who hasn't played ASTRO's Playroom.
There really isn't anything right now to couple actual retailer inventory to the shopping cart.
Sony did implement an interesting system earlier but also a bit flawed. Today it got fixed I noticed. They initially had a queue system. But the queue only helped regulate traffic.
The way it was supposed to work was that you go to direct.playstation.com and it would put you in the queue after you solve a captcha. You are supposed to wait in the queue and then you get access to the store to buy either a digital or a disc ps5.
But even the queue didn't foolproof anything because depending when you hit the site, you may have waited 1hr to access the store page and find out the system was sold out!
Why? Simple..the direct Sony site would load the whole store page in the background instead of directly redirect to the queue website. Simply pressing Esc the minute you saw the store page redirect, you were left in session of the store page.
What people ended up doing this past weekend was watching twitter where Wario64 would tweet about stock somehow and then they would use the Escape trick to drop into the store page, add the system to cart and checkout. You had to be really quick with it too.
I exploited it myself but I was too slow to have my details filled out on the checkout page. All of reddit was talking about it in a live chat so several people were doing this and were able to snag a console. Apparently you can't set up a shipping address or card before hand unless you bought something from the direct site before.
Today Sony fixed that exploit and now if you go to the direct.playstation.com you get immediately redirected to the queue if they actually have some stock coming. Before, people that had no idea you had to do the Esc trick would be waiting in queue for like 3 hrs wondering what the hell happened.
The only system that I actually like is EVGA's program. You sign up with your email, when an item comes in stock like a 3080 or 3090 you get an email with a personalized ink that lasts 8 hours. Only you can use the link and you have 8hrs to complete your transaction.
No clue why Sony didn't do something like this. Initially they did with the random invites. But this is something they should have done once they opened the direct store to everyone not just invited members because right now everyone can access it.