This article is from WeChat official account: love child norm (ID: ifanr) , Author: Musi, title figure from: IC photo
In the past two weeks, I have developed the habit of checking overseas BestBuy and Amazon once a day, scanning Taobao shopping carts, and free fish collection lists.
The reason is to buy a Sony PS5 at the original price, or a little higher than the original price.
Unfortunately, I really underestimated the shortage of next-generation consoles this year.
After reading the following two news items, you can feel how popular this thing is now.
One is a truck robbery in Chile. A local game retailer stated that a truck full of PS5 was robbed by criminals and was forced to postpone the delivery date of all players to next month. Because it was not one or two that were robbed, but a whole car.
The other is the package drop by Amazon in the UK. Eurogamer reported that some British users bought the PS5 at the original price on Amazon. When they opened the box, they saw strange things such as pedicure equipment and wheat flour. Some people also received canned cat food and dog food, but the PS5 ordered was actually I haven’t seen any of them.
Some users who booked PS5 on Amazon received something completely unrelated to the game console
The victims speculated that the suspects were either the cargo drivers or the couriers. They should have reached a deal with the scalpers and dropped the cargo during the transportation. But now Amazon officially cannot reissue it, because there are no more PS5s in the warehouse.
“Buy it, earn it” is a true portrayal of every PS5 user who has grabbed the original price.With Sony’s scarce supply, scalpers all over the world are scrambling to participate in the “speculation” of the PS5, waiting for the inquiries from one after another. The price will not rise.
1. Crazy price increase
First, we are talking about the spot, that is, you place an order, and I can send it immediately; second, we are talking about a floating price, that is, the price will change every day, you see the price now, only today’s The market price does not represent tomorrow.
On November 19th, Sony PS5 was officially launched in Hong Kong. When I consulted a store at Xianyu, he replied with this paragraph and attached a few real shot pictures to prove that there is indeed a spot on hand.
A stock image sent to me by a seller on Xianyu
Compared with North America, Japan and other places, the Hong Kong version of PS5 was launched about a week later. Many players hope that after the emergence of the Hong Kong version, the excessively high “scalper price” of PS5 can be pulled to a reasonable range.
But the trend of price cuts did not appear.
At that time, the PS5 was experiencing the craziest speculation period. The original price of 3980 Hong Kong dollars/499 US dollars/49,980 yen CD-ROM version of PS5, even if you add freight and other expenses, the RMB is only 3,500 to 4,000 yuan.
However, the first batch of Japanese PS5 “spots” that entered the Chinese market once had a premium of 8,000 to 10,000 yuan, which is equivalent to a two to three times increase, enough for you to buy the latest iPhone 12 Pro, or It is a good game book.
Zhihu’s topic about PS5 speculation, and the first batch of shops that put on the Japanese PS5
The arrival speed of these Japanese version machines is also very fast. Even if the PS5 was only released in Japan on November 12, many machines had already crossed the oceans on the weekend of that week, and under the slogan of spot goods, they boarded Taobao and Xianyu platforms.
A store that didn’t make a Japanese version and was waiting for the Hong Kong version to ship the agent told me that because of the inconsistent sales time in different regions, many people hope to use this time difference to make a quick profit. The first batch of shipments is also small, and it’s normal to speculate if you include transportation costs.
As of December 1, the price of PS5 in Hong Kong (here in Hong Kong dollars)
However, in less than a week, the price of parallel imports of PS5 began to fall. By the time the Hong Kong version was launched on the 19th, the price had dropped to around RMB 7,500. At this time, many stores already had ample supply, even if it was still not a reasonable price.
The shortage of PS5 in the Asia-Pacific region is probably related to Sony’s initial supply strategy. An earlier Bloomberg report stated that Sony focused its PS5 launch on Europe and the United States, while the number of the first PS5 received by Japanese retailers was obviously not.During the PS3 period, shipments were greatly restricted.
Third-party statistics can also explain the problem. According to the analysis of VGChartz, at the two launch nodes on November 12 and 19, the global shipment of PS5 is about 2.1 million to 2.5 million units. The US region alone accounts for 1 million to 1.2 million units, and the European region is 660,000 to 800,000 units, while Japan only accounts for 110,000 to 120,000 units. As for the Hong Kong version, there are obviously fewer.
Of course, this year’s epidemic has also affected the production and transportation of the mainframe. Many countries only open e-commerce channels to make reservations and cannot sell in offline stores, so you will not see profiteers go to offline stores to receive goods, which also gives scalpers the opportunity to operate online.
Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan also said in an interview with TASS that if we encounter this kind of global epidemic next time, he will definitely not choose to market a new game console: “We even enter the factory. No, I can only rely on the camera to remotely monitor the production line.”
Europe and the United States have a larger supply of goods, which is often related to local demand, but it does not mean that there are no scalpers there. On the contrary, if you are rushing to buy on foreign websites, you may not be fighting one or two scalpers, but fighting the robbing robots.
A foreign organization called CrepChiefNotify recently revealed its “snap-up results” in a high-profile manner. The looting robot they use can automatically monitor the PS5 inventory of the e-commerce website. As long as the stock is recognized, the order and payment process will be completed in batches.
Now, they have bought about 3,500 PS5s, and they will surely sell them at a higher price to profit from them, but netizens seem to have no other choice but to curse them online.
The price of PS5 on eBay is also doubled~3 times
This form of scanning goods using automatic scripts also appeared on Switch in the first half of this year. At that time, due to the epidemic situation, the inventory of Nintendo Switch was in a hurry. Some merchants changed the original shoe-grabbing software and turned it into a “order-grabbing robot” that specifically grabs the Switch. After the e-commerce channel is finished, it will be transferred. Sold to dealers and players, the price will double.
Even if the platform has targeted attack scripts, the scalpers will develop new response strategies and continue to stage the “cat and mouse game”. In the end, players who want to buy the machine at the original price will be squeezed. It is also the reason why many people hate scalpers.
Second, in the face of interests, everyone can be a scalper
Most people think that scalpers are organized, but for ordinary people, when an item is hot enough and the price increase is increased to a certain level, it will also bring a tempting excuse to grab the goods.
Individual sellers offer prices, sometimes not lower than the so-called scalpers
A PS5 seller who works in Japan and just got the pre-order quota told me on Xianyu that he bought two machines on the first launch day, one for his own use and the other for sale. But as an individual seller, the price he gave was not much lower than that of domestic spot merchants during the same period.
During my negotiation with him, he replied this paragraph:
Everyone is at this price, and I didn’t cheat you. Buy early and enjoy early. Isn’t that true?
Strictly speaking, these people who have geographical advantages and are not full-time purchasing agents are not scalpers who stock up and resell machinesThe party, but in the face of market conditions, they are not willing to give up their interests and make a loss-making business.
At this time, it is difficult for us to distinguish whether they are scalpers or customers.
The same situation seems to be applicable to popular products such as iPhone 12 and RTX 3080 graphics cards. For PS5, it is not just pure merchants who are really involved in roasting, but there are also many ordinary people who rush to buy with the mentality of “making extra money”.
After all, if a machine is bought at the original price and resold, it will make a net profit of several thousand yuan. As long as someone starts, a group of people will pounce on it.
But individuals often don’t know the market premium. A compromise is to refer to the price of the “peer”. Since everyone sells this way, I will subconsciously feel that “I am not selling this way too much.”
So, who determines the real market price? After all, it is still those dealers and distributors who are behind the scenes and hold the source of goods.
They maintain a delicate relationship with stores further downstream, and together become the “trader” of this market.
In fact, many merchants selling PS5 have formed a “tacit understanding” of price adjustment. For example, last week, the price of the PS5 optical drive version was still at the 7,500 yuan mark, but starting this week, everyone has reduced the price to the beginning of “6”, the pace is very consistent, it is obvious that the upstream delivery price has changed.
The scalpers did not intend to persuade ordinary consumers who “if you don’t buy, I don’t buy, profiteers lose two hundred a day”, they know in their hearts that those who will actually place orders are actually those who don’t need money. As long as Sony’s production capacity cannot increase, there is no need to worry about prices and no market.
Of course, not all scalpers can get the goods at the original price or even lower than the original price.
Many small and medium-sized stores do not have a big business. They can only negotiate prices with second- and third-level agents. Sometimes they have to take the goods with other items. No one knows how many hands were transferred in the middle, except for the freight After waiting for the expenses, how much you can earn is another matter.
After the involvement of complex middlemen, the scalper’s price will have great flexibility. Today, the premium is 3000, and it may fall by 1500 in two days. As for how fast the price drops, it still depends on the popularity of the product, The situation of replenishment.
On the other hand, PS5’s own “parallel import” positioning in China also gives the scalpers an opportunity to increase prices.
Because these machines are not officially listed in mainland China, it is difficult to trace the source of the goods. Even if there is a price increase on Taobao and Xianyu, there is no agent responsible, and consumers have no way to complain.
Some players told me that now he hopes that the licensed PS5 can be introduced as soon as possible, so that these scalpers will be in their hands.
To some extent, the significance of an orderly licensed market also lies in this. This is reflected in the previous Tencent agent Nintendo Switch, and earlier licensed PS4 and Xbox One. Although there are many restrictions on licensed game consoles, after they show up, they can still play a guiding role in the parallel import market and stabilize the overall market price.
Three, no one wants to “hungry marketing”, but stock is the prerequisite
The product is scarce, and the higher price will get it. Regardless of the Spring Festival travel tickets, concerts, sneakers or limited hand-held areas, for consumer electronics products such as the PS5 that are mass-produced, the scalper’s madness is essentially due to the imbalance between supply and demand, which has caused supply to exceed demand.
However, it is not an easy task to ensure that everyone who wants to buy the product can buy it, and at the same time let the factory produce only the amount that just meets the market demand.
Apple is clearly a positive example of supply chain management. When Jobs invited Cook to join Apple at that time, he fancyed his mature supply chain management methods, and he did improve the turnover rate of Apple’s inventory.
A good supply chain is ultimately reflected in selling goods. Take the iPhone as an example. Even if all the goods on the first launch day are sold out, Apple will postpone the payment order and give a forecast time for the delivery. Now Facebook also adopts this scheme when selling Oculus VR devices. Consumers have expectations.
If you don’t close the payment page, but at the same time give an estimated delivery date, many people may not patronize the scalper
In contrast, the game industry seems to be creating a phenomenon of “hunger marketing” when it first releases a new product.
If you have experienced the PS4 launch day a few years ago, you should know that Sony’s supply was also very tight at the time. A machine was fired up to a price of 10,000 yuan, and PS5 has repeated this history again.
The point is, you don’t know if Sony is really out of stock or pretending to be out of stock.
The Verge complained in the article “The game industry has been behaving badly when selling important products” and said that this year’s PS5, Xbox Series X and RTX 3080 pre-orders and sales can be called “A disaster of complete chaos.” There is no order postponement, and there is no reasonable reservation queuing mechanism. Whether you can buy it depends on your luck.
This kind of non-disclosure and opacity of sales information is also a situation that scalpers are most willing to see, so that they can create a sense of scarcity and raise prices. But if all manufacturers can, like Apple or Oculus, allow users to place an order and pay, and at the same time inform the arrival time of the product in advance, perhaps many people will no longer patronize the scalper’s business.
The shortage of PS5 is only temporary, but when the scalpers will no longer increase the price, Sony cannot give an accurate answer. The industry predicts that the undersupply situation of next-generation consoles may not be relieved until the first quarter of next year. Of course, Sony should also be thankful, because its main competitor, Microsoft, is also not very optimistic about the supply of consoles. .
This year’s Christmas business battle, Nintendo can lie down and win.
This article is from WeChat official account:Love Faner (ID: ifanr), author: Moose