Hope that everyone had a good Christmas, and hopefully you still have some additional time off on the schedule over New Years! I know I have taken quite a bit of time off, and have been enjoying some time away from focusing on making money.

Selling Sony PS4’s

Today’s post will be about my experience selling Sony PS4’s.  In the past, when consoles first hit the market there have been temporary shortages of supply after release date.  In these instances the available supply can’t meet the current demand, which causes the price of the item to increase above it’s normal retail value.  That was my play with the Sony Playstation 4.  At the end of June I pre-ordered 4 PS4s from amazon (my credit card wasn’t charged until they shipped in November).  One was the launch edition, and 3 were a PS4 with one game included.  There was a limit of 1 preorder of each, so I decided to preorder 1 of all 4.

The total cost of these 4 items was $1,859.74.  The bundles with the various games cost between $459.98 to $499.90, and just the PS4 was $399.96.  I sold 3 of these PS4s on eBay.  Here is a screenshot of the sales from my eBay account (click to enlarge):

I started all of these auctions at $0.99 and charged $24.99 for shipping.  After all of the shipping and fees from eBay and Paypal I ended up with a total of exactly $1,495 from these 3 PS4s.  I also sold the 3 games that were bundled in with the PS4s that I purchased on amazon with total proceeds after fees of $120.61.

You are probably wondering what happened to the 4th PS4, since I only sold 3 on eBay.  It turns out that my brother wanted a PS4, so I sold it to him for face value of $400 cash.  So, the total I received from these 4 PS4s and the games was $2,015.61.  So, my profit on the initial $1,859.61 investment was $155.87, less than a 10% return on my investment.

This is way less than I was hoping for, but I did not lose money and I have learned for the future.  I wanted to try this out as I felt there was potential for very large returns (100%+) as were seen when the PS3 was released, and I felt that it would be worth the investment.  As it turns out, A LOT of people had this same idea of buying pre-orders to resell online.  This kept prices from really skyrocketing on eBay, and in addition the shortages of PS4s in stores did not last very long as they have been in stores fairly regularly throughout December.

Based on this experience, preordering consoles such as this will not be a strategy I employ in the future.  I believe it ties up too much capital that can be used elsewhere, and the returns are not guaranteed.

I consider this a learning experience, and hope that it can help you in some way in the future.  Did you sell any PS4s or Xbox One consoles that you preordered? or have you had success with this type of strategy in the past? Let me know in the comments!