What is Digg?83 Comments
- kazem, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3My friend, who works in the XBox team at MS, got a free one and immediately put it on eBay. He sold it for $1100. It plays VIDEO GAMES. How is that worth $1100? I guess there's a lot of wealthy gamers in the world...
- fude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1200,000 sold? no.
anyway my friend and i sold 4, and we checked all week and beyond it was not $800 a unit, it was more like 500-600 - marcus_r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If even HALF of those numbers paid via PayPal, which is a liberal estimation, considering Americans prefer things fast, Ebay just made a ***** assload of money and yes, that is my unit of measurement, a ***** assload.
- threshold8, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"I wouldn't recommend this route a friend and I tried to do it we only made $150 on each xbox."
I sold mine with 2 games and an extra wireless controller for $1100. Made $500 off the deal... Merry Christmas to me! - Womp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1We all know MS is "Saying" there is gonna be a shortage... But we all know they shipped out few units to cause sales to be generated on Ebay. Smart move on there part though.. Wish I had bought a few.. Reminds me of the days when I was selling "tickle me elmos" and "Furby's" online... I made a killing there....
- Visceral, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not really. The make more money on games, so it behooves them to sell MORE boxes at cheaper prices so as to push more games. Great story though.
- valan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have a friend who got some other guys together and bought 29 xboxes, they made $14,000.
- superspak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"How much did e*Bay make from these sales??"
well ebay makes 10% from every sale, right? and each sale probably hit lets say 1 grand each, there were 40000 sold, hmm 4 million dollars - vhold, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Each time a person buy's an xbox 360 at $800, they have $500-400 less to spend on games, so this is a lose-lose situation for microsoft, except for the fact that it's building hype, which I suppose most likely will pay off in the long run. When nintendo's various N64 shortages lifted, there was generally a buying frenzy.
There is no way microsoft could get away with 'secretly' selling their own product on ebay using thousands of sellers without ebay taking action because that'd amount to identity fraud and it'd be rather obvious. - hfswagon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1
How much did e*Bay make from these sales?? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1looks like digg dropped part of my post...
--continued from above
...An insertion fee is 0.35 if your initial listing price is below $1.00. An item with as high demand as an Xbox 360 shouldn't require a listing price higher than that. Even with the most egregious estimates on this board, the revenue would be chump change to eBay, which generates over a billion in revenue and $250 ~ $300 million in net income per quarter. For eBay, this is just a fun story...its not big money. - marcus_r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I believe Ebay/PayPal deducts 3 percent of every Pay Pal transaction.
If someone does the math with any variety of estimations such as the one above, you can see... Assload is the proper term to use. - MalDON, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Whats wrong is you know that stores, and probably the big ones too, are selling them on ebay. This is probably why there is so little in supply. Lets just say that a friend of mine works for a Best Buy and they took ten of their boxes and auctioned them off for like three times the retail price.
- TubaFrog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ebay users will buy anything; Do a search on "Nascar".
- blakis49, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It'll be pretty funny that all these people spent so much money on it, once supply equals demand ;). Hell some guy on ebay spent $600 for an XBOX 360 poster. People on eby aren't only clueless, they are stupid...
- MrPaulAR, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I sold a 360 on eBay for $1500. The day after the auction completed eBay cancelled my account *for selling the 360*.
Since then I have faxed them a receipt, drivers licence, signature saying I agree to TOS and they *still* refuse to reactivate my account. - skyhighrockets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0yeah, I first saw this on xbox-scene.com
It's insane though, selling for $900 average on ebay, just insane. - nazarie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Of course, it would have been interesting for Microsoft to go into a deal with eBay and sell the 360 exclusivly via auctions. Let the market decide on the price. eBay takes a cut and Microsoft walks away with a bundle. It would avoid all the pushing, shoving, waiting, stealing, etc. that was a result of the 'shortage'
- xjohnmcclanex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0why didn't they just reserve one in may when you could? i did, walked in at midnight, picked it up, drove home, and then realized how dumb i was for hooking it up and playing when if i waited about 10 hours i could have made about 500 bucks. ah well, i got one, it rules. bill gates rules. MS rules.
- marcus_r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Supply and demand.
- rm999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"Not really. The make more money on games, so it behooves them to sell MORE boxes at cheaper prices so as to push more games. Great story though."
Take econ 101. Ideally, a company would sell a product for as much as the customer will pay for it (ideally for the company). That is exactly what an auction does. While demand is high, they could sell xboxes for 1000 dollars that they otherwise would have sold for 400. net profit from the alternative: 600 dollars. I don't see any flaw in that logic, because the people who bought it for 1000 dollars will by just as many, if not more games, then the people who bought it for 400. - Mr.Ortiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm not buying the conspiracy theory but, Visceral, your logic is way off. It never "behooves" anyone to sell low when they can sell just as many units at a higher price. Since supply is so low, they can charge whatever they want and still sell out. Microsoft makes more money on games because they sell the console at a loss. If they were charging $800, it wouldn't be a loss. Furthermore, anyone who can justify $800 on a console surely has enough left over for at least one game.
- DamnedEyez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0So they sell half their inventory through stores and list the other half. They get a nice markup, and any that don't sell on ebay just gets added into the next delivery. That'd be a sneaky and nice (for MS) sheme.
- skater2968, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I don't understand why people can't just wait. well... if you want one for little Timmy or Jessica this Christmas i could see paying 1100 dollars, as my friend who manages the local Eb games is back-ordered through mid January, i can only assume this is not just a store-specific thing.
- Buddybot111, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm definitly doing this with the ps3. Gonna preorder maybe 2-3 then sell them the night they come out. Get tons of money. I doubt microsoft is selling them on ebay cause if they did the supply would go up, demand would go down, and prices would drop. Its like saying the government is gonna print there own money so they can get rich, it doesnt work.
- DamnedEyez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I can just see, with some console in the future, the company selling a (supposedly) limited number a few weeks or month earlier through auction sites.
- Eyot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'd rather wait and buy an xbox 360 for $499
- jefferson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ahahahahahahahahahahahah
this made me laugh so hard, what ebay is not telling you is how many people dont get paid buy the winning bidders, I have at the time of writing 3 people who bought xbox 360's from me who have not payed.
As for that 40,000 number if you figure i have 3 out of 5 buyers who dont complete the transaction you end up with a number around 200,000 which is still a *****, and ebay gouges the ***** out of sellers now by double dipping into paypal and ebay fees ya they are rich as ***** and good for them, but the numbers in this story are not a reality.
additionally and this is what ebay will never tell you is that alot and I mean alot of scammers operate on ebay, especially for something like xbox 360 they will spend months leading up to this time selling small items and getting good feedback then list xbox360 get the money and be gone, and contrary to popular belief (and by belief I mean ignorance) you will not get your money back from ebay or paypal, without a huge amount of work on your part.
so 200,000 xbx360 sold ( this is an estimate)
ebay gets 20$ on average
4,000,000$ bucks
and lets be real generous and say 1 percent of the sold boxes are scammers (id be willing to bet 100$ its closer to 10%)
thats 20,000 scams which ebay has to pay back to buyers who lost money at an average rate of 600 bucks an xbox( =12,000,000) means that ebay would lose 8 million dollars.
now even if one of my numbers is off even by 10,000 it doesnt even put a dent in that formula
anybody want to wiegh in on this id really like to figure it out for sure cause that seems like a huge amount of possible loses for ebay - greatdevourer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Grr! People selling them on eBay when there are sudh shortages. My local GameStation has 2! Yes, that's right, 2! Not 2 left. They were only shipped 2 360s!
- robognome, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0set $assload = 10 ^ $hitload;
- MikeCampo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0An assload is quite a lot.
- Alaerus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"40,000 Xbox 360s Sold on eBay!"
--what they fail to mention is that 20,000 of them were only the boxes. - Omicron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0a friend of mine waited overnight with me at Best Buy to get one to sell on ebay. he sold his spot in line for $300 to some rich parent who promised his kids a 360. probably could have gotten more on ebay, but did it for cash and w/o all the hastle.
- procras, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html
I'm guessing anyone who's selling a 360 probably sets a reserve price at what they paid for it, so likely $3.60. Then take out the percent of final closing value. If the average sale price is indeed $630, eBay's cut will be $21.68 per auction. Not bad for them.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure if MS were selling their own product on eBay for above its list price that would be highly illegal. - vannyx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is scary to me , I'm a financially challenged person and i like to spend my money on reasonably price hardware and software. But if the companies sees all these people , lining up , ready and willing to buy a console for 400 and games for 60 and then see them buying consoles and games at a premium price, 500-1200 for the hardware and who knows how much for the game. Whats to say that if they dint see the high price affecting sales in a negative way. They start raising prices. Next console you buy causes more than a computer and the games cause 100 bucks, NeoGeo didn't do too well because of this. But i guess in todays market NeoGeo could have done well.
- afrazkhan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Hmm, no mention that a marketing guy at Microsoft admitted in an interview that their strategy would be artificial demand. Okay I can't find the source anymore, but I thought it would be the hot topic once the 360 launched and not completely forgotten like it seems to have been.
I suspect Sony did a similar thing with the PSP, but of course Sony's marketing department isn't nearly stupid enough to admit that. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Wouldn't it be convenient if Microsoft was selling these on eBay making a huge profit off their perceived shortage? Makes sense to me if I were a shareholder.
- mikew101, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0ebay will make some good money. The insertion fee will likely cost over 2.00 plus you have to pay the closing fees when it sells which it will. If it is $800.00 then it will be like 20.00, if it's sells for more then ebay will make even more.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fees.html - johnhummel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I did it - bought mine from Costco for $517. Sold it for $805, so minus Paypal and eBay fees, I still made $250. Enough to buy my wife a nice Christmas present and still put away $100 into the "buy a new Powerbook" fund.
My only regret is that I couldn't get my sister to stand in line with me so we could buy 2. - buckdog05, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0They would be making a ***** load of money if they just made their own account and sold a bunch of 360s.
- Jarrod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Why does common logic go out the window in Digg comments?
If you assume that Microsoft is "selling them on eBay themselves, we've been PWNED!", you are saying that Microsoft, several years ago, created thousands of fake ebay accounts, began accumulating feedback by selling other items, and now POW is here to sell the 360 with those eBay accounts that had been so carefully created for just this purpose.
Even someone living in a cave wearing a tinfoil hat would have trouble buying that story. - rileyjt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0EBay usually takes 10-15% of the gross price depending on if you use Paypal or not. Not a bad slice for them and the holiday season is just heating up along with the European launch.
- swaxhog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+030,000 of those turned out to be domain names, carboard cutouts, or a box with 360 pieces of an X-box.
- windwaker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0You guys are insane. Whoever started this article (good job, btw, forgot to digg it) copied down my description from a forum post; I didn't actually mean that they -were- doing this. :P
- Nobi-Wan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ha! I bought 2 Core systems and sold one last week on eBay for $600. Basically I got a free system and I haven't even listed the other system and the 2 hard drives I have sitting in my closet.
- mixxtape2000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"According to eBay president and CEO Meg Whitman, a staggering 40,000 Xbox 360 consoles have been sold on eBay. So, if each 360 was sold for $800 (which is still a conservative estimate), that's... $32,000,000+ on eBay. Microsoft alone could make tons of money simply 'reselling' their own product."
No, 40,000 Xbox box's have been sold on Ebay. Cruel bastards sold the Xbox 360 box's for 600-1000 dollars. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@jefferson
eBay doesnt pay you for the item if you have a non paying bidder...and what person would ship a $600-800 item before they receive payment??? - barryq, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1http://images.channeladvisor.com/Sell/SSProfiles/10060876/Images/poo.jpg
- dimatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0seriously, why do people buy them at that price ??
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This board is hilarious. Have you guys ever looked at eBay's or Microsoft's financial statements? Have you thought about how much of a distribution headache it would be for MSFT to create a bunch of eBay accounts and sell machines on individual auctions? Why would MSFT go through so much trouble to make a couple hundred extra bucks revenue on eBay per machine when it'd probably cost them nearly so much to manage the distribution? Maybe $4 million is a lot to people on this board, but that's such an insignificant figure that it'd get rounded off in the news story when it comes to revenue. MSFT generates $10 billion in revenue each quarter and a billion dollars free cash flow a month.
It sounds like most people here have never sold anything on eBay. An insertion fee is 0.35 if your initial listing price is -
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