iPhones are a hot commodity, I wonder why I never have to play "beat the scalper" when I want to buy one? I don't wonder at all, of course, because when I order a iPhone that is in short supply I simply get placed in a queue. It might be three months before I get a phone, but at least I know I don't have to spend my days refreshing a web page. I order, I'm done with that task until it shows up.
But, yeah, blame the players and not those that could shut down the game any time they like.
Before iPhone's were as widely available as today, there were similar problems with scalpers buying them all. Apple even banned buying them with cash [1] so they could limit purchases per customer.
A simple "pre-ordering"-queue seems it would decrease scalper interest as well (?) as it would be much more risky to order a bunch, hope you get early in the queue and sell to people who might get their machine just little time later.
Let people put up a small deposit as well for getting a place in the queue, and it'll be deducted whenever you buy the machine. Keep the deposit if you cancel your place in line. Would incentivize less manipulation as well.
I've been trying to get a PS5 for 2 years now, and I refuse to pay some scalper 200USD more than market price, out of principle. (But I guess that is also why I still don't have one :) )
iPhones are profitable the minute they walk out the door - you buying music or apps or whatever is just gravy. Add to that the day-one markups (earbuds, charging cables, apple care), they have every incentive to put you in the hands of a caring, dedicated salesperson who can upsell you up to your capacity.
Your playstation, on the other hand, requires you to buy two or three games, and if the games aren't there yet for mass market appeal or sufficient genres, well, the console will still be there in four years when the games catch up, and your iphone will be out of date in six months.
In both the manufacturers and scalpers minds, nobody would bother scalping an iPhone - the margin was already sucked out of it and it has a shorter shelf life; In the case of a console, the margin won't be had for a few years, but none of it flows to the casual scalper, so it's a lot of work for 100$ - they'll do it, but it's a grind.
But either way, people are happy to wait in line for the latest fondleslab, and they get it when it's their turn
The steam deck has a queue system as well of course. While there's a risk that the buyer doesn't see the notification email that it's ready, the fact that you generally know that you'll get one within a year is very nice.
So without scalpers you have to wait until supply catches up, while with scalpers you can either wait until supply catches up or you can pay extra if you really want it now. How is the first scenario better?
So the solution is to have Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo sell directly to the consumer? Apple can do this because they don't have to keep third party retailers happy, they own the distribution chain from top to bottom.
I am baffled why this is not being implemented across the board. It is a solved problem.
It leads me to believe these companies do not really care enough to implement the systems to fix this or that they actually like the artificial scarcity as it fuels additional demand. The fact that they can figure out how to implement live lottery systems, sadly, makes me conclude it is the latter.
I personally flatly refuse to pay over retail price or lineup outside of a store for the “opportunity” to buy something. Nothing is going to change if people keep paying a premium for products be it an SUV or a PS5.
I just buy whatever is available. I've never noticed the difference between Samsung AXX and Samsung SYY. It takes calls, pictures, emails and texts, can auth, slack and alert me for meetings.
Apple is able to have a queue for iPhones because they control the iPhone supply - both in the sense that they are the OEM for the device and in the sense that they have very strong control over their own suppliers. Vendors are not going to treat everyone equally when Apple is a big fish that can wreck your business if you don't play ball.
Retailers do not have this kind of power. If Best Buy pre-sells more iPhones than they have inventory for, there's nothing obligating Apple to actually sell those iPhones to those customers through Best Buy. Apple could decide tomorrow to cut Best Buy's allocation because AT&T needs them for a big customer promo. Compounding this is the fact that almost all retail businesses are cash-flow limited. Their job isn't to buy things and sell them at 1% markup, it's to predict the future three months ahead of time so that products arrive on shelves exactly when they will be purchased. In other words, they're futures traders that take physical delivery. So every dollar they get needs to be spent on more inventory, or they run out of things to sell.
This means that, in the event of an iPhone shortage, Best Buy has two terrible options and one good one:
* Treat those iPhone orders as ordinary revenue and use it to order more stock of other products. If Apple cuts your allocation, then you have to refund your customers money that you don't have, meaning that you have to take out a loan on future revenue to pay back existing orders.
* Tie up your cashflow by holding that iPhone money in escrow until those orders are fulfilled. You don't take on the risk of not being able to refund orders, but now you are paying the opportunity cost of not being able to buy as much inventory three months down the line.
* Don't sell unallocated iPhones. Your customers will buy something else instead.
Now, could Apple extend their queue system beyond their own online store? Perhaps - but that requires a lot of coordination from other retailers who would rather just be able to move product quickly. The flip side of the cash flow problem I mentioned above is that, if a product doesn't move quickly, retailers want to get rid of it quickly to cut their losses and take a chance on something else. A good example of this would be the iPhone SE 3rd gen, which sold like garbage. Under the current arrangement of retailers getting allocation and buying inventory, Best Buy can at worst fire-sale iPhones nobody wanted. But with a queue system, they're either...
* Just drop-shipping iPhones from Apple to customers, which means they can't have in-store inventory
* Holding inventory they can't sell unless Apple lets them, which means they're letting iPhones live rent-free in their warehouse tying up cash flow.
The "just let me queue up" model is something that works out great for customers, but makes the rest of the business a lot harder, because modern supply chains are not designed for shortages.
I never understood why the retailers of these consoles don't adjust their prices to reflect the demand, so that there's at least some supply. When the PS5 first came out, for example, the price with retailers was like 1/4th of the price on ebay, and it was impossible to buy from the retailers.
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? At least then, the incentive to be a reseller/scalper would diminish to nothing, which means you don't pay for their premium.
I think it's for the same reason why car manufacturers don't like it when dealers sell over MSRP; it hurts the long term customer relationship. Higher MSRP means fewer buyers which means fewer services, repairs, etc.
More expensive consoles means fewer owners, fewer people buying console games and subscriptions.
They already de-facto did this. There were times where Best Buy and Walmart had supply, but you had to sign up for a subscription service like Walmart+ to be able to purchase. GameStop had a few "bundles" with a bunch of items that you wouldn't otherwise purchase, effectively raising the price. It just didn't make a dent when the actual eBay margin was $X00 over the retailer pricing
- Consoles in stockrooms are not making money for the retailer or the platform/brand/manufacturer.
- Sales figures (units shipped) are a marketing point. A product being so in demand that it makes the news is a free marketing campaign.
- Retailer got so many units to sell at a margin/price they already decided on. The fact that the stock moved out the door is a win already. Customers coming inside to find out that there are no PS5s are customers inside the shop.
- It seems likely that Sony/whoever may have some control over the pricing. Whether this is a formal agreement or a gentle suggestion, ignoring or breaking that deal would presumably (at least) sour the relationship.
- Surely the retailer that moves first would lose business to their competitors. I guess at that point, the competitor/s run out of stock and now the first mover is the scalper?
- If we're assuming that the retailers have some altruistic motive, they could implement strategies to combat the bots / buying en masse. This does not appear to be something they are interested in.
> Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices?
The people who are already priced out will be in the same situation, except now it's the "good guys" doing price gouging. The scalpers will have lost their business to the retailer I guess.
Reading the article, this seems to be the core issue:
> “When your browser checks out an item on a retail site, it sends ‘requests’ to the site’s server. These requests are basically commands that tell the server what to do. Add this item to the cart, submit my order, and so on,” they wrote. “We send those commands associated with checking out to the servers of sites we automate without requiring a browser. Basically, we can mimic what a human does, stripping out the unnecessary lags and delays of a browser.”
> "The service is optimized for Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart."
This is hardly just game consoles, the whole baby formula problem is similarly gamed:
Basically, if you see a shortage anywhere in the consumer/retail goods market, you can use a pool of capital to buy up all the remaining product as quickly as possible - assuming you have access to a pool of capital. This is the same kind of thing that happens in wartime scarcity, the only difference between this and say WWII is the bot technology being used. Now you're the sole supplier and can jack up prices and earn huge percentages. The resellers are just little black market manipulators, in other words, and the bot writers are their facilitators.
However, the main sources of product are the big corporate retailers, Amazon etc. They can't jack up the prices themselves (well, they can to some extent as current 'inflation' price hikes are resulting in record profits), but do they really care if automated bots are placing orders? Are they going to write bot-detecting software that might reduce the amount of orders being placed online? Why would they, that would reduce revenue.
It's not too surprising that this situation has come about, it's basically monopolistic manipulation of markets throughout the whole supply chain. A deregulated neoliberal paradise has many similarities to a war zone economy.
PS5 market is definitely bonkers.
After sitting through some of the crazy queues on the playstation site and giving up on direct to consumer I did manage to score one, but it was tedious for a few days getting hammered by every twitter notification from a few of those accounts that watch and post when stock becomes available.
When I did land a unit, it wasn't without a price shock of its own as GameStop was selling as bundles. So, yeah I ended up with maybe a couple of games that I would rather not have bought up front and they were pretty close to full retail price.
This was all very, very frustrating. Sony knows I have years of history with them going back to PS3 era. They could throw me a freakin' bone and let me reserve a spot in a queue, even if it was in agreement with a 3rd party retailer - I'd be cool with that. They could manage this situation so much better.
//
Not to mention that once I got my unit, the storage evaporated almost immediately. PS5s hold about 5 or 6 "large games" at a time!
The total inability for anyone to get a PS5 is one of the strangest things I've seen in modern gaming. Sony have even basically stopped marketing it and resigned to defeat. It almost feels like we're going to skip this console generation.
You would think they would be incentivized to fix this problem, even though it has been going on for years now. People will lose interest eventually and spend their money elsewhere. A few years back I was going to build a gaming PC, with an RTX 1080. I could never find the card in stock. As the years passed that 1080 became a 2080, then a 3080, and finally a bass guitar.
Fundamentally, it's a mispricing issue. The consoles are too cheap. The manufacturers aren't producing enough to satisfy the quantity demanded at the prices they are charging. This allows scalpers to make money off consumers. They should probably raise their prices while the shortage lasts.
They’re priced against each other also, and they have a delicate balance to work with to make sure they don’t become “too expensive” in the minds of consumers.
Seems like HFT in the real world. What did hft defenders always say? That they are just liquidity providers, right? But no one says there is a need for this extra liquidity. I wonder whether regulators will ever target this.
> But no one says there is a need for this extra liquidity.
The fact that scalpers can sell the consoles for a much higher price shows that there is no market equilibrium with respect to the prices that the console vendors set. To achieve this, console producers could choose two strategies:
a) increase production
b) increase prices
a is impossible because of chip shortages, so b would be the way to choose to achieve "supply = demand" (i.e. everybody who is willing to pay the market price will get a console). Since console producers are not willing to do this move (perhaps for "marketing reasons" à la "our console is this cheap"), scalpers will make use of this market inefficiency, and ensure that the prices are those where there is a market equilibrium.
So, scalpers change the situation from "there is more demand than supply" to "supply = demand", making the market balanced.
Thus, the existence of scalpers is rather are sign that the console producers chose a price that is too low. The existence of scalpers is thus a mere symptom of the bad pricing decision of the console producers.
Consumers are seeing a need for the scalpers; their service is valued at $200-$300. Whether or not 20 people botted a single one for their own personal use, or one person botted 20 to scalp, you don't have one in the end. Pay $200ish over MSRP and all the headache of locating and securing one goes away. It would be nice if supply kept up, but it's clear at this point that it's not going to.
This is just arbitrage, and has very little to do with HFT. In a normal market, scalpers don’t exist because when products are flying off the shelves you either raise your prices or increase your production. Game console companies are for some reason unwilling to sell their consoles at auction (which would eliminate scalpers) or increase production so an arbitrage opportunity is born
I thought Microsoft's scalping mitigation was clever: for a long while now there has been no shortage of availability of the Xbox All Access bundle: you buy the Xbox Series X/S on time, bundled with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, at a small discount over buying the Xbox up front and paying for 2 years of Game Pass Ultimate, so effectively negative interest.
> Manufactured scarcity is crucial to a bot’s notoriety, says a person who knows the sneaker industry and asked to remain anonymous for employment concerns. It lets us imagine the sea of PS5s that could be ours, if only we could breach through that locked door. “Creating FOMO is part of the business plan,” the person says.
Are you a programmer that wants some internet fame and name notoriety?
Write an open source bot that is free for everyone to use which duplicates these kinds of features, but is geared more towards the average person who just wants to score a single ps/5.
While I would certainly welcome such a project, I wonder if a truly open source bot would be hampered by the fact that online retailers could view the source and proactively circumvent whatever strategy it implements.
if you are able to do a resale at a much higher price, the price from Sony or whatever should be higher. The bots are just discovering the real market price. Not sure why they don't raise the price to whatever the bots are selling at.
I wonder if people who are willing to pay extra for consoles from a scalper are more likely to spend more on games / digital downloads / etc. If that is true it would be an incentive for sony / microsoft to NOT fix the problem...
Is there a reason that retailers for certain hot commodities don't just require a unique credit card coupled with a unique shipping address to effectively limit a customer to one item? Have this restriction automatically lift after two weeks from the last purchase for that particular customer so that they can buy another one if sufficient time has elapsed.
I'm baffled because it feels like this would instantaneously fix the scalping problem and it's not particularly difficult to implement.
This is likely a losing strategy, while it would likely work for a little while people will find a way to circumvent the restriction.
The simpler way to get around scalping/arbitrage is to raise prices so that those who are producing the product are the beneficiaries of the higher price. They can then turn around and tell customers that they are taking that revenue and putting it back into producing more widgets.
However, there are certain industries where a lack of supply and rewarding middlemen is actually part of the business strategy. In fashion, entertainment, and luxury goods there is a certain cachet in obtaining items that other people cannot.
You can provide whatever info you want on the second mailing line (e.g. Apartment A, Suite 100, Floor 2) and you have a unique shipping address.
I have 4 credit cards. My dad has 23. I had a friend who had over 100 when he was loading up airline miles. Let's not forget anyone can go to walmart and pickup a visa/amex gift card for a unique identifier.
And I thought of this within 30 seconds of reading your post. Imagine a dedicated scalper..
There are services which give you a one time CC number such as privacy.com. I'm unsure how shipping address might also get similarly obsfucated (po boxes?).
Microsoft is already sort of just, doing both while keeping retailers within that loop with Xbox All Access which includes cloud gaming - https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-all-access
If you want to buy a console off the shelf you have to compete with other buyers, but sometimes there's a separate pool of consoles reserved for Xbox All Access subscribers.
Subscribing to it isn't something you should really do if you're intending to flip the console and it's harder for scalpers to scale up. It requires a credit check and on-going payments, plus it includes Game Pass Ultimate which cannot be resold as it's part of the cost of the subscription which could eat into scalper profits. Attempting to scalp through Xbox All Access is probably a losing proposition unless you were to go down darker more illegal paths.
If manufacturers were actually interested in quashing resellers they could bind the console to a specific user account during the order process, say for three or six months.
I'm surprised that direct sales with one-per-address aren't a thing yet.
Cuts out the 15-30% cut your retailers are taking, boggles scalpers, guarantees your fans get what they want, without anyone getting ripped off.
I don't understand the problem. I've had everything from a spanner to a chair shipped directly from Chinese factories. What's stopping them doing the same with high end consumer electronics?
I would think it would be in the retailers best interest to require an online account in order to sell a console as well. Scalpers don't stock up on physical games unless they're limited edition. It's in the retailers' best interest to get physical people in their doors.
[+] [-] mikestew|3 years ago|reply
But, yeah, blame the players and not those that could shut down the game any time they like.
[+] [-] pxeboot|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.wired.com/2007/10/the-iphone-cash/
[+] [-] klintcho|3 years ago|reply
Let people put up a small deposit as well for getting a place in the queue, and it'll be deducted whenever you buy the machine. Keep the deposit if you cancel your place in line. Would incentivize less manipulation as well.
I've been trying to get a PS5 for 2 years now, and I refuse to pay some scalper 200USD more than market price, out of principle. (But I guess that is also why I still don't have one :) )
[+] [-] abofh|3 years ago|reply
Your playstation, on the other hand, requires you to buy two or three games, and if the games aren't there yet for mass market appeal or sufficient genres, well, the console will still be there in four years when the games catch up, and your iphone will be out of date in six months.
In both the manufacturers and scalpers minds, nobody would bother scalping an iPhone - the margin was already sucked out of it and it has a shorter shelf life; In the case of a console, the margin won't be had for a few years, but none of it flows to the casual scalper, so it's a lot of work for 100$ - they'll do it, but it's a grind.
But either way, people are happy to wait in line for the latest fondleslab, and they get it when it's their turn
[+] [-] havblue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangecat|3 years ago|reply
So without scalpers you have to wait until supply catches up, while with scalpers you can either wait until supply catches up or you can pay extra if you really want it now. How is the first scenario better?
[+] [-] jandrese|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
It leads me to believe these companies do not really care enough to implement the systems to fix this or that they actually like the artificial scarcity as it fuels additional demand. The fact that they can figure out how to implement live lottery systems, sadly, makes me conclude it is the latter.
I personally flatly refuse to pay over retail price or lineup outside of a store for the “opportunity” to buy something. Nothing is going to change if people keep paying a premium for products be it an SUV or a PS5.
[+] [-] anothernewdude|3 years ago|reply
Who cares about everything else?
[+] [-] kmeisthax|3 years ago|reply
Retailers do not have this kind of power. If Best Buy pre-sells more iPhones than they have inventory for, there's nothing obligating Apple to actually sell those iPhones to those customers through Best Buy. Apple could decide tomorrow to cut Best Buy's allocation because AT&T needs them for a big customer promo. Compounding this is the fact that almost all retail businesses are cash-flow limited. Their job isn't to buy things and sell them at 1% markup, it's to predict the future three months ahead of time so that products arrive on shelves exactly when they will be purchased. In other words, they're futures traders that take physical delivery. So every dollar they get needs to be spent on more inventory, or they run out of things to sell.
This means that, in the event of an iPhone shortage, Best Buy has two terrible options and one good one:
* Treat those iPhone orders as ordinary revenue and use it to order more stock of other products. If Apple cuts your allocation, then you have to refund your customers money that you don't have, meaning that you have to take out a loan on future revenue to pay back existing orders.
* Tie up your cashflow by holding that iPhone money in escrow until those orders are fulfilled. You don't take on the risk of not being able to refund orders, but now you are paying the opportunity cost of not being able to buy as much inventory three months down the line.
* Don't sell unallocated iPhones. Your customers will buy something else instead.
Now, could Apple extend their queue system beyond their own online store? Perhaps - but that requires a lot of coordination from other retailers who would rather just be able to move product quickly. The flip side of the cash flow problem I mentioned above is that, if a product doesn't move quickly, retailers want to get rid of it quickly to cut their losses and take a chance on something else. A good example of this would be the iPhone SE 3rd gen, which sold like garbage. Under the current arrangement of retailers getting allocation and buying inventory, Best Buy can at worst fire-sale iPhones nobody wanted. But with a queue system, they're either...
* Just drop-shipping iPhones from Apple to customers, which means they can't have in-store inventory
* Holding inventory they can't sell unless Apple lets them, which means they're letting iPhones live rent-free in their warehouse tying up cash flow.
The "just let me queue up" model is something that works out great for customers, but makes the rest of the business a lot harder, because modern supply chains are not designed for shortages.
[+] [-] layer8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|3 years ago|reply
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? At least then, the incentive to be a reseller/scalper would diminish to nothing, which means you don't pay for their premium.
[+] [-] shahbaby|3 years ago|reply
I think it's for the same reason why car manufacturers don't like it when dealers sell over MSRP; it hurts the long term customer relationship. Higher MSRP means fewer buyers which means fewer services, repairs, etc.
More expensive consoles means fewer owners, fewer people buying console games and subscriptions.
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwery|3 years ago|reply
- Sales figures (units shipped) are a marketing point. A product being so in demand that it makes the news is a free marketing campaign.
- Retailer got so many units to sell at a margin/price they already decided on. The fact that the stock moved out the door is a win already. Customers coming inside to find out that there are no PS5s are customers inside the shop.
- It seems likely that Sony/whoever may have some control over the pricing. Whether this is a formal agreement or a gentle suggestion, ignoring or breaking that deal would presumably (at least) sour the relationship.
- Surely the retailer that moves first would lose business to their competitors. I guess at that point, the competitor/s run out of stock and now the first mover is the scalper?
- If we're assuming that the retailers have some altruistic motive, they could implement strategies to combat the bots / buying en masse. This does not appear to be something they are interested in.
> Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices?
The people who are already priced out will be in the same situation, except now it's the "good guys" doing price gouging. The scalpers will have lost their business to the retailer I guess.
[+] [-] blitzar|3 years ago|reply
They have - you could buy a console bundled with a game, headset and a tshirt for huge markups.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
> “When your browser checks out an item on a retail site, it sends ‘requests’ to the site’s server. These requests are basically commands that tell the server what to do. Add this item to the cart, submit my order, and so on,” they wrote. “We send those commands associated with checking out to the servers of sites we automate without requiring a browser. Basically, we can mimic what a human does, stripping out the unnecessary lags and delays of a browser.”
> "The service is optimized for Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart."
This is hardly just game consoles, the whole baby formula problem is similarly gamed:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2022/05/13/baby-fo...
Basically, if you see a shortage anywhere in the consumer/retail goods market, you can use a pool of capital to buy up all the remaining product as quickly as possible - assuming you have access to a pool of capital. This is the same kind of thing that happens in wartime scarcity, the only difference between this and say WWII is the bot technology being used. Now you're the sole supplier and can jack up prices and earn huge percentages. The resellers are just little black market manipulators, in other words, and the bot writers are their facilitators.
However, the main sources of product are the big corporate retailers, Amazon etc. They can't jack up the prices themselves (well, they can to some extent as current 'inflation' price hikes are resulting in record profits), but do they really care if automated bots are placing orders? Are they going to write bot-detecting software that might reduce the amount of orders being placed online? Why would they, that would reduce revenue.
It's not too surprising that this situation has come about, it's basically monopolistic manipulation of markets throughout the whole supply chain. A deregulated neoliberal paradise has many similarities to a war zone economy.
[+] [-] boopmaster|3 years ago|reply
This was all very, very frustrating. Sony knows I have years of history with them going back to PS3 era. They could throw me a freakin' bone and let me reserve a spot in a queue, even if it was in agreement with a 3rd party retailer - I'd be cool with that. They could manage this situation so much better.
// Not to mention that once I got my unit, the storage evaporated almost immediately. PS5s hold about 5 or 6 "large games" at a time!
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cartoonfoxes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lttlrck|3 years ago|reply
> The PS5 has been selling 80,000 units in 82 minutes, on average.
Whether they are scalpers or not, they ultimately end up in the hands of consumers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/05/26/ps4-sold-6...
[+] [-] stavros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seunosewa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polskibus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] q-big|3 years ago|reply
The fact that scalpers can sell the consoles for a much higher price shows that there is no market equilibrium with respect to the prices that the console vendors set. To achieve this, console producers could choose two strategies:
a) increase production
b) increase prices
a is impossible because of chip shortages, so b would be the way to choose to achieve "supply = demand" (i.e. everybody who is willing to pay the market price will get a console). Since console producers are not willing to do this move (perhaps for "marketing reasons" à la "our console is this cheap"), scalpers will make use of this market inefficiency, and ensure that the prices are those where there is a market equilibrium.
So, scalpers change the situation from "there is more demand than supply" to "supply = demand", making the market balanced.
Thus, the existence of scalpers is rather are sign that the console producers chose a price that is too low. The existence of scalpers is thus a mere symptom of the bad pricing decision of the console producers.
[+] [-] seabird|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChadNauseam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buescher|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
Are you a programmer that wants some internet fame and name notoriety?
Write an open source bot that is free for everyone to use which duplicates these kinds of features, but is geared more towards the average person who just wants to score a single ps/5.
Flood the bot market with competition.
[+] [-] tragiclos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjfl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swighton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway675309|3 years ago|reply
I'm baffled because it feels like this would instantaneously fix the scalping problem and it's not particularly difficult to implement.
[+] [-] pg_bot|3 years ago|reply
The simpler way to get around scalping/arbitrage is to raise prices so that those who are producing the product are the beneficiaries of the higher price. They can then turn around and tell customers that they are taking that revenue and putting it back into producing more widgets.
However, there are certain industries where a lack of supply and rewarding middlemen is actually part of the business strategy. In fashion, entertainment, and luxury goods there is a certain cachet in obtaining items that other people cannot.
[+] [-] grepfru_it|3 years ago|reply
I have 4 credit cards. My dad has 23. I had a friend who had over 100 when he was loading up airline miles. Let's not forget anyone can go to walmart and pickup a visa/amex gift card for a unique identifier.
And I thought of this within 30 seconds of reading your post. Imagine a dedicated scalper..
[+] [-] sapienwastey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw__away7391|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CMay|3 years ago|reply
If you want to buy a console off the shelf you have to compete with other buyers, but sometimes there's a separate pool of consoles reserved for Xbox All Access subscribers.
Subscribing to it isn't something you should really do if you're intending to flip the console and it's harder for scalpers to scale up. It requires a credit check and on-going payments, plus it includes Game Pass Ultimate which cannot be resold as it's part of the cost of the subscription which could eat into scalper profits. Attempting to scalp through Xbox All Access is probably a losing proposition unless you were to go down darker more illegal paths.
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rasbora|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
Let me buy my OLD Switch directly.
[+] [-] jbenner-radham|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causality0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oliwarner|3 years ago|reply
Cuts out the 15-30% cut your retailers are taking, boggles scalpers, guarantees your fans get what they want, without anyone getting ripped off.
I don't understand the problem. I've had everything from a spanner to a chair shipped directly from Chinese factories. What's stopping them doing the same with high end consumer electronics?
[+] [-] havblue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|3 years ago|reply