Seems scalping is big for the ps3 launch

Does this mean after 2 years retro core will be reviewing ps2 gc and xbox?

 

What a joke

But if you can afford them and then confident on shifting them

Good luck............basteard

 

Funny. When some other guy hordes consoles, he's a bastard, but when ASSEMbler does it, its ok.

 

well, yeah, ASSEMBler owns the forums here, so.. lol Besides, we know for fact that Kevin is a cool guy

 

Nothing wrong with hoarding and reselling.

It's all a function of the demand. No one buys up thousands of copies of Starfox Command at retail and resells them for 4x as much on eBay because the demand doesn't make such activities feasible.

If you're going to blame anyone, blame parents who can't say "no" to a screaming brat who "wants it right now". They're the cause of all the hysteria.

To a lesser extent, fanatical early adopters cause hysteria also, but 95% of the craziness this time around is because of reselling.

 

We could go there and grab a few, I got a piece, but no bullets, so if the shit hits the fan I'll throw it and hope it smacks that dude in the head...

Meanwhile, you get a couple and boxes and run:nod:

Great plan huh? just like Iraq...

 

Lucky for us this time Sadam isn't around to order 200 Ps3s for missile launching :lol: Sony and their PR crap:lol:

 

That shit is for real! my friend's cousin got his arm cut off by a DVD tray over there!

And the torture! they are forced to play Tekken Tag all day! is hell!

 

Well it seems that people are pretty upset about the scalping. I thought I’d talk about it from my point of view as a reseller just to let you know that it’s not always black and white….

I bought two of them and resold both of them. One 20 GB and one 60 GB. I got about $1250 each for them (pretty shocking for the 20 GB). I paid retail which means I got both for a total of $900. After fees and etc I probably made about $1200 total.

First of all, doing this is a risk. Like anything with a good payout the larger the risk the larger the reward. You can make a lot and you can also lose your shirt. If I don’t have any charge backs (knock on wood) then I’ll do well. If one of them gets charged back then I basically break even.

I did the same thing for the 360 in Japan. I bought 2 of them and I shipped them to my address in the US and sold them there when I went home for Christmas. One of the sales went well. To make a very long story short, on the second transaction I ended up being the middle man for a transaction but I wasn’t aware of it. That wasn’t even the problem. The person I sent it to realized that I wasn’t the person she bought it from and promptly sent it back to me.

Well, the package was last seen in Denver, Colorado, then the Post Office lost track of it. I got scammed. Not by the buyer, not by the person I sent it to on behalf of the buyer, but by a post office employee who walked out the door with my 360 in hand. The person I sent it to tried to do what was needed to file a claim, etc, but in the end the post office was giving her different stories and after a month of trading emails she finally gave up. I couldn’t file a claim without her since she was actually the sender. I actually give this person credit for spending at least a couple of hours trying to help me, including more than one trip to the post office.

So, I lost the $400 on the system plus another $125 shipping it to myself in the US first. That means overall I took a loss on the 360 launch. And like I said I wasn’t even scammed by anyone in the deal, I was robbed by the Post Office. The ability to take a loss comes out of left field sometimes.

It’s basically a form of gambling. It’s what I do so I don’t cry or make excuses when I lose. It was my choice, I took the risk, and whatever happens, happens. People will see what I made on the PS3 but don’t realize that it’s far from guaranteed money and I’m one phone call away from losing it all.

If one of my PS3s gets charged back, then it means I will have taken a loss overall for the 360 and the PS3 sales. If both end up being OK then I made less than what you see with just the PS3 deal because of the loss on the 360s. It’s never black and white unless you’re doing one deal only and you never do another one after that and you don't get scammed.


The fact is that anyone who wanted a PS3 could have gotten one. The launch date was no secret. You could have called any store to find out when they were taking reservations. That’s what I did. And when the day for reservations came I set my alarm, got out of bed, and sat in front of the store like everyone else. I had no inside track or employee friend who did any back deals for me.

When I got there the line was smaller than I thought so I started calling people to let them know that if they wanted one they cold get one. Yakumo was the only one who went to his local store to try to get one. Everyone else passed, even tho by the time I called them they would have had to wait for only 30 minutes tops.

Why is there so much sympathy for these hard core gamers who didn’t get a system? I had no advantage. I just got out of bed and went down there. People knew there was going to be a massive shortage but they decided to stay in bed anyway. I know not everyone could make it, but let’s not pretend that “hard core gamers” were locked out by schedule to such a great extent.

The article about the Tokyo Bic opening is a joke. It wasn’t the case all over Japan, and judging by the author’s ability to pretty much be everywhere at once I’m wondering to what extent his story was true. He could hear the conversations between the first buyers and the sales people? He watched some guy by it, get interviewed, then go to a train station? He saw the line at different times, saw the manager actually speaking to the Chinese employee, saw the man without cash go back to the line to get money (hmmm…this must have been the only one who spoke ANY Japanese out of all of these non-Japanese speaking Chinese people…wow, that sure helped, huh?), saw someone get 20,000 yen, etc. I mean this guy saw everything from all angles, sometimes at the same time.

There were no Chinese people in my line, just Japanese people talking about the PS3 and playing with their Nintendo DSs and PSPs. All you had to do was show up. The article was written to make the extraordinary seem like the norm which is what the media does. They know people are angry about the resales so they’ve found a situation to focus people’s anger on. In the end it’s just a device that people will use to excuse themselves for not making the effort or taking the risk.

I won’t know if I’ve made any money on the PS3s for another month or so. Until then it’s a waiting game. One day I might open my email and see a chargeback through Paypal. But you won’t hear me bitch or complain if I do, I just move on to the next deal.

So there’s no injustice to those who knew there would be no supply yet did not do anything about. And there’s no injustice if I take a loss because of my risk. If you want to blame someone, then blame Sony for not having enough consoles on hand. That created this entire secondary market that you’re seeing now and everyone knew it was going to happen before it started.

The Chinese and the mafia aren’t taking over and resellers aren’t all basking in the sun and lighting cigars with $100 bills. There’s no big conspiracy forcing out the real gamers. It’s not rocket science, but it’s never black and white.

 

Told you you'd fetch the same price In some older post I suggested that people buy the 20GB model instead, to make more money, since the Ps3 is a Ps3, and people who want it wont care if its the 20GB or 60GB model This is especially true considering that the 20GB model is only 20% of the total production run. Marketing and Statistics, awesome subjects

Feels nice to be right ^_^ :lol:

 

This whole chargeback thing is sorta scaring me.

I'm not sure I'm going to accept any sort of Paypal/CC payment for my auctions, probably just money orders, cashiers checks, and personal checks.

I've done a ton of business on eBay before and never had a chargeback, but I guess it's a different game when you're dealing with all these big-ticket items.

Just need to be sure I don't get screwed with the Wii pre-sale I already sold, but the buyer looks reputable (lots of buying auctions with real stuff won, good feedback).

 

Japan-Games, what you did I don't think anyone can really complain about. You weren't really greedy or underhanded about it. But some people actually are hiring homeless people or just anyone to try to get ahold of as many systems as possible to try to make big bucks. While I think that's greedy, I can't say I care or think its wrong. I mean honestly, you can have all the PS3s you want, I don't want one. I'd like lots of money from selling one.

I'd certainly have liked to bought a PS3 and sold it and got a nice profit off of it. But like you pointed out, it's a gamble. What if the unit you got was defective? What if they scam you? What if it's lost in the post or damaged in the post and you can't make a claim on it? I'm not really comfortable with those risks, nor was I that comfortable with the idea of camping out to buy a PS3 or anything else.

 

its the same reason I didn't bother going for that scam, alot of people really dont realize how much risk and effort it takes to resell these things. Not only that, think about the fees.

I bet you pay pal is going to make a ton off transactions. I just posted the artical cause I didn't think anything like this would happen in japan and that there was an issue with homeless chinese people over there.

Here in the U.S. it was much uglyer. Someone and reporter got shot with a bb gun, another group of people got trounced in fruit punch by a drive by with a super soaker, somones car window was smashed in, another got held up at gun point, etc.

If anything I have learned from this, game launches are really getting out of hand and I for one from now on would rather wait till something is readily avalibe in supply this sit in line wondering if I am even going to get a unit or my life threatened. Everyone welcome to the next gen console war.

 

Kudos on that, I'm doin the same:thumbsup:

 

I bet that guys 100 ps3 are 80% defective.

 

well selling them is fine. What's lame is the assclowns that are on ebay who are ruining the auctions for sellers.

You can do a simple search and find some that reached 99 million dollars and some that only got up to the tens of thousands. That's pretty damn lame, and I would be pissed if I were a seller.

 

100x 600 = 60,000 USD w/o tax. did she get a loan or something?

 

Not to start an argument but here is my 2 cents...Sorry I have to say the ebay buy something new and stick it on ebay thing I find rather funny(Odd). I can see a value to get different region but the point of camping out just to resale it I find pretty dumb and frustring for the average consumer who has to compete agaist dealers just to get something they want to have fun with. So if you end up with people ruining auctions it is a fault of the complete system and falls back to the dealers who probly pissed these people off in the first place.

 

Probably just charged them up to a credit card.

CC = free 30 day loan.

Given the current market conditions one should be able to move a least half (if not more) of the systems in the first week and that'll more than cover costs.

Pay off the card bill and everything else is pure profit.

-hl718

 

100 consoles is a high risk venture. You need advertisments up the ass and "friendly" prices in order to clear stock before it runs out of steam. How many consoles a day is she expecting to sell? Statistics of profit aren't on her side when it comes to certainty of profit, just a high peak in the graph *if* she hits the sweet-spot.