A check of price trends on eBay shows many items selling for nearly double their retail prices. We’ll dive into what’s behind the higher prices and how you can expect to get your hands on the best stuff with real value in the comments section.
Buyer Beware: Online Price Spikes
There has been a lot of discussion on the internet about the trend of online marketplaces reselling brand-name consumer goods like smartphones, cars, and even designer clothing and jewellery, procured via Return Pallets UK or similar methods, at massively inflated prices. The prices start out with discounts but then quickly go way up, leaving buyers feeling ripped off and high on anger.
The eBay seller names that pop up on Marketplace with the highest prices on electronics items span almost every major consumer product. In some cases, buyers even complain they’ve had to purchase the items as items and then be reimbursed for the transaction as products.
With tech-related items, eBay sellers frequently charge triple the retail price for their goods. In the marketplace’s electronics category, an Apple MacBook Air laptop, which sells for around $1,500 on eBay, sells for around $6,000 on eBay, according to data from Consumer Reports’ new Consumer Reports Shopping List research tool.
A person could pay $1,500 in eBay cash for that laptop and still have cash left over for at least four online purchases of other popular tech items. The notebook had a reported MSRP of $1,300 but was listed with a retail price of $1,500 in the online marketplace last week.
With something like cosmetics, at least online shoppers know to head to original retailers or manufacturers’ sites, like Reil-cosmetics.at.
Striking Tech Deals Online
The story is similar to many other tech and consumer goods categories. Tech and electronics websites like DealNews have tracked rising prices on tech items and explained it to their buyers. From a camera to a Samsung Galaxy tablet, buyers have reported pricing increases of 30 to 50 percent.
While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason for such substantial price increases, there’s a reason we see an uptick in sales during the holiday season. Shoppers are seeking out the best tech deals online.
One reason could be the fees that ecommerce platforms, like eBay, charge on these platforms as the sellers have to pay a certain amount of money in order to use their services. The sellers would then have to raise the price of the product in order to have any meaningful profit on the sale that they make.
Now, in order to arrive at a rough estimate of the profit that they might potentially make, sellers may often use an ebay fee calculator to assess their profit margin before finalizing with the sale. This can ensure that they aren’t making a loss. As for the buyers or shoppers, some of them may not mind forking up the extra bit of money for the product that they wish to purchase.
And to help these buyers, there are price alerts services like the DealNews alerts, for example, that serve customers in finding the best deals in a particular category.
Cristian Tirolian from DealNews told Business Insider that there’s a new influx of tech goods being sold for inflated prices. It appears to be due to a new market for these items, where big buyers, like retailers, are buying in bulk from eBay sellers and then reselling it to end buyers at an even bigger profit.
“All of a sudden you have lots of these enormous companies, some of them American, dumping a ton of these items on eBay and then putting in their own markups,” Tirolian said.
You’re never really looking for the kind of customization and tailoring offered by 4th & Avery if you’re on platforms such as eBay, in any case…
Toys, Shoes, Laptop, Accessories, etc…
With brand-name goods like clothing and shoes, shoppers often see pricing spikes from retailers before retailers pull their ads and start selling those items at the pre-advertised price.
Although online retail websites like eBay often ban items from being sold at steep discounts, there’s a huge segment of buyers out there that will keep trying to buy products at a discount until they find it. Once again though, for specialist supplies, you’d be looking to go straight to bespoke retailers such as Stndrdz.
“It’s a problem. The brand gets dinged or burned a little bit,” Tirolian told Business Insider.