Nvidia just launched pre-orders for their Ampere series cards. Interestingly after an enormous demand, they went out of stock in minutes. The same story continues for some other 3rd party vendors for these cards. Consequently, once the official websites were all out of stock, people went on eBay and the results will surprise you. A lot of people on eBay are selling the preorder units for an insanely high price and people are actually bidding on them.
eBay is an American multinational e-commerce corporation based in San Jose. It facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. What that means is that this website has a business model that allows users to post advertisements for one to one deals. People post adds with a fixed price or they post a product description and users can bid on it. It is one of the most popular websites for consumer deals.
Now as we mentioned earlier Nvidia and other aftermarket vendors opened pre-orders for their latest cards. These were extremely low in quantity and went out of stock in just a couple of minutes. This is not something new as it happens with every other hyped electronic release. What’s different this time is that most of the users can’t yet go to the physical stores and buy the devices themselves. However, we did hear rumors about lower stock in the past,. Nvidia is a big company that should have kept that in mind.
Once these pre-order devices went out of stock it was obvious that people bought them in bulk to sell later. Consequently, a lot of users turned to the popular forum eBay and to their surprise the cards were there just with a small twist. While people normally expect these prices to be higher because of all the hype and stock issues. These prices were through the roof. check out one of the tweets that shows these prices
nvidia really dropped the ball on that RTX 3080 launch and now bot driven scalpers are reselling the cards nearly twice as much. also who the hell is bidding on this???? pic.twitter.com/mB2IvkPfh1
— Giancarlo Arriola (@garriola83) September 18, 2020
The eBay Prices:
The bid prices of these cards are much higher than the actual retail prices Nvidia sold them for. One thing that didn’t make sense at first was why these adds had bids on these. As it turns out there are some bot scrips that allow users to put these bids. Later the Bots automatically bid on them without any intention of buying the item. The same thing happened with PS5 as well and a lot of members from eBay are tired of these scams.
While a lot of these adds will not actually pay up. They still put the reliability of the platform in question. If someone with minimum knowledge of technology was to buy from one of these people it would really be a bad situation. Furthermore, it’s not like they’re charging a few dollars more. That would’ve been fair and reasonable for early stockers. These cards are up for ten to twenty times the price of actual products.
This problem is not limited to eBay only another twitter user also spotted an RTX 3080 on Amazon with a similar price like this.
Über 15.000€ @asusde
Ich dachte die neuen Karten werden etwas günstiger. #RTX3080
ASUS TUF-RTX3080-O10G-GAMING ASUS https://t.co/ecQ77kp7Rn via @amazonDE pic.twitter.com/XBTDHuNG5b
— NoDeschPro (@NodeschPro) September 17, 2020
This is one of the big drawbacks fro having online retail of products and there is nothing Nvidia or e-commerce websites can do about it. The only thing users can do is ignore these products until the owners put them again at reasonable prices. And if you’re not that impatient on getting anew card wed recommend waiting for the stores to restock and getting one yourself at a good deal. The more we discourage these advertisements the less frequently tell pop up.
Follow this link for updates on RTX 3000 series Stocks.