Over the past few months, resellers have been scalping everything from computer hardware to consoles, with even older components seeing a sharp increase in price for the same reason. Among all these, the next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft were the most lucrative targets for scalpers. While reselling the PS5 brought in profits of up to $42 million for scalpers over at eBay and StockX, the Xbox Series X|S consoles sold for relatively lower prices.
While the PS5’s peak price in the reseller market was nearly 260% higher than the MSRP, the Xbox Series X and S were mainly priced 140-180% higher than the base price.
Most of the scalping took place between late October to early December, after which the retail price mostly returned (close) to normal.
| Console Graph | MSRP | Total Sold | Median Price | Past Week Median Price | Casual Scalper Break Even | Sophisticated Scalper Break Even | Total Sales | Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits | Estimated Scalper Profits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xbox Series S | $299 | 18,339 | $460 | $438 | $385 | $304 | $8,572,490 | $2,379,638 | $1,292,467 |
| Xbox Series X | $499 | 50,990 | $836 | $750 | $639 | $507 | $43,253,936 | $5,518,138 | $9,171,837 |
| Total | N/A | 69,329 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | $51,826,425 | $7,897,776 | $10,464,304 |
Over at eBay, 69K units of the next-gen consoles from MS were sold, with the majority of them being the Series X (~51K). The Series S sold a relatively paltry amount of 18K with an average price of $438 while the Series X went for $750. The former resulted in a profit of $304 per unit for scalpers while the latter was much more profitable at $507 per unit. Overall, the total profits added up to $10 million, with the Series X accounting for nearly the entire sum.
| Console | Total Sold | Average Sales Price | Last Week Average Price | Total Sales Volume | Estimated StockX Profits | Estimated Scalper Profits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xbox Series S | 12,635 | $416 | $405 | $5,256,160 | $473,054 | $579,599 |
| Xbox Series X | 31,256 | $723 | $630 | $22,598,088 | $2,033,828 | $3,523,880 |
| Total | 43,891 | N/A | N/A | $27,854,248 | $2,506,882 | $4,103,479 |
At StockX, nearly 44K units were sold, with 31K being Series X hardware and 13K Series S. The average sales price for the two consoles were roughly the same as that at eBay, but in comparison, the total number of units sold was quite a bit lower and as such, the profits were too.
Interestingly, the scalper profits from the resale of the NVIDIA RTX 30 series cards were much higher than those from the resale of the Ryzen 5000 and Radeon RX 6000 processors. While the Ampere lineup brought in ~$15 million for scalpers, the new CPU and GPU lineups from AMD brought in just over $500K for resellers (each) over at eBay, with the StockX profits being in the tens of thousands.
