$199 Totaltech Paywall Helps Scalper Snag 20+ GPUs From Best Buy

Ebay coupons make sense, but uniformed shoppers? It is more work and more computer savy to create an Ebay account than typing "shower curtains" in Google to find the best price.
 
Maybe you can answer a question that I have had for a long time. I often see USED items on Ebay selling for MORE than the price of NEW items in stores. Are Ebay users stupid, lazy, or is there another reason (maybe shipping or non availability of the item where they are located) ?
Yea that one is weird. I get in bid wars over a used item but i refuse to go near retail price of it. I wonder if people 'feel' it is a bargain if it is on ebay
 
Yea that one is weird. I get in bid wars over a used item but i refuse to go near retail price of it. I wonder if people 'feel' it is a bargain if it is on ebay
That’s probably the closest description I can attribute to the situation.

Side note I recently had to resort to eBay for a hardware purchase and sweet mother of god I will never ever do that again. Holy crap Batman was that a nightmare.
 
Yea that one is weird. I get in bid wars over a used item but i refuse to go near retail price of it. I wonder if people 'feel' it is a bargain if it is on ebay
I think it's a matter of people having that sense of "oh, maybe a little more and I can win it!!!"
 
Maybe you can answer a question that I have had for a long time. I often see USED items on Ebay selling for MORE than the price of NEW items in stores. Are Ebay users stupid, lazy, or is there another reason (maybe shipping or non availability of the item where they are located) ?
If it is just a little more and the item on eBay is "good has new" (outside the obvious getting in a bid war, lack of information from the above), different taxation than for a new item ?

I always find it strange for most item to even close to the store price, warranties/return/possible issue wise and so on wise make it seem not worth it.
 
Nvidia / Best Buy's policies for selling FE cards have gone a long way toward putting me off of team green in the future.

Meanwhile, AMD's "direct" sales via Digital River seem to have gotten better. I managed to get a 6700xt early last year, though the process took several weeks of me waiting for drops and was generally a shit show. Since then, bots completely overwhelmed AMDs webstore (last Summer) followed by (at some point since then) AMD/digital river implementing a queue system for Thursday morning sales where I guess you get placed in line with a random position. I know of two people who were able to buy cards at MSRP this way and neither was using bots... point is, there are reasonable ways to combat bots and scalpers and Nvidia/Best Buy clearly don't give a damn about trying. Better to run their brand through the mud to eek out a few more dollars than put cards in the hands of consumers.
Whether the cards are purchased by bots for the purpose of scalping, by bots in an attempt to level the playing field with the scalpers, by individuals through dumb luck, or by individuals via a lottery, they're all technically ending up in the hands of consumers. They are just not necessarily ending up in the hands of the consumers that are gamers.

Plus there are still crazy levels of demand from miners, despite both manufacturers releasing variations of their products that are not targeted at mining (Nvidia's LHR models and AMD's 4GB models).
 
Not sure if its commented on yet in the thread, but hte major tax changes for sellers is going to affect a LOT of listings on ebay, not just GPU's, but the intent here is that the pain being inflicted upon ALL of us by these Tax Changes MAY actually start deterring scalping of literally everything from Toilet Paper to GPU's since now anything more than $600 in total electronic payments to you will put you on the IRS's radar for a 1099-k form in 2023............which means you are going to have to prove to the IRS that you're not a business and do NOT owe the federal government any taxes on profits/gains you made in 2022.

This will mean tax implications for scalpers, but also a burden placed upon you and me in that anything above $600 a year in money we take in...well now Uncle Sam is going to ask us to explain ourselves or pay up.

from a GPU Scalping perspective: This could help deter the casuals who "oh look, I can re-sell that".....maybe.
 
Maybe you can answer a question that I have had for a long time. I often see USED items on Ebay selling for MORE than the price of NEW items in stores. Are Ebay users stupid, lazy, or is there another reason (maybe shipping or non availability of the item where they are located) ?
Lately Ebay is against price wars. If you're a seller that always under cuts the competition then don't be surprised if you get taken down for a reason that is against their policy but other sellers on Ebay are unaffected even though they're doing the same tactic. Very often it's other sellers who rat out sellers that are under cutting. For me it used to be Ebay where I'd find the best prices for car parts but that hasn't been the case in years, as RockAuto has the better prices. Good luck returning stuff that's broken because Ebay makes it impossible now. I bought a motherboard for a Lenovo laptop and it arrived broken but Ebay wanted me to communicate with the seller who wanted a serial # that I gave him and claimed the number wasn't correct. Like I need a valid serial # to return something, but Ebay gave him a month to respond and ultimately the case was dismissed. I also bought a subwoofer from a seller on Ebay who never shipped it out and never responded to my communications. I gotta wait weeks before I can tell Ebay step in.

So basically Ebay is encouraging sellers not to undercut each other while offering no chance at return products, even products you never receive. I still go to Ebay due to habit and I imagine I'm not the only one. If you don't shop around like I don't sometimes do then you might over pay for something on Ebay. Gamers Nexus had an issue with NewEgg and was rightfully mad but they made it sound like Amazon and NewEgg were the only sellers online to buy PC parts. PCPartPicker would like to disagree with this and most of the time if I'm looking for a PC part I first look on PCPartPicker.com before I do any Ebay hunting.
 
Not sure if its commented on yet in the thread, but hte major tax changes for sellers is going to affect a LOT of listings on ebay, not just GPU's, but the intent here is that the pain being inflicted upon ALL of us by these Tax Changes MAY actually start deterring scalping of literally everything from Toilet Paper to GPU's since now anything more than $600 in total electronic payments to you will put you on the IRS's radar for a 1099-k form in 2023............which means you are going to have to prove to the IRS that you're not a business and do NOT owe the federal government any taxes on profits/gains you made in 2022.

This will mean tax implications for scalpers, but also a burden placed upon you and me in that anything above $600 a year in money we take in...well now Uncle Sam is going to ask us to explain ourselves or pay up.

from a GPU Scalping perspective: This could help deter the casuals who "oh look, I can re-sell that".....maybe.

Obligatory disclaimer that I am not any sort of tax expert.
I have been told that "hobby"/personal (non-business) sales via 1099-K can be reported as schedule D (capital gains) as opposed to schedule C (self employed business income). This would only pass muster if you: are not a business, are selling items you personally bought for your personal use, and kept records of costs that can be deducted vs the overall sales price. If you are utilizing ebay as an online garage sale and can prove it, you may not have any tax liability - though you have to jump through hoops to report it as such.

I do think this change will deter your typical scalper - eventually. I sort of expect those people to be the same lazy folks who don't pay attention to these changes in tax code. They won't be deterred from anything until they get bit in the ass with a tax bill in 2023...

Plus there are still crazy levels of demand from miners, despite both manufacturers releasing variations of their products that are not targeted at mining (Nvidia's LHR models and AMD's 4GB models).
I haven't been following the mining situation closely but that surprises me. If most of the profit is tied to Ethereum, and Ethereum is going proof of stake soon (unless that changed again?), how do they get a return on investment at this point?
 
Obligatory disclaimer that I am not any sort of tax expert.
I have been told that "hobby"/personal (non-business) sales via 1099-K can be reported as schedule D (capital gains) as opposed to schedule C (self employed business income). This would only pass muster if you: are not a business, are selling items you personally bought for your personal use, and kept records of costs that can be deducted vs the overall sales price. If you are utilizing ebay as an online garage sale and can prove it, you may not have any tax liability - though you have to jump through hoops to report it as such.

I do think this change will deter your typical scalper - eventually. I sort of expect those people to be the same lazy folks who don't pay attention to these changes in tax code. They won't be deterred from anything until they get bit in the ass with a tax bill in 2023...


I haven't been following the mining situation closely but that surprises me. If most of the profit is tied to Ethereum, and Ethereum is going proof of stake soon (unless that changed again?), how do they get a return on investment at this point?
Ethereum has been going proof-of-stake for years, so until it actually happens, there is still money to be made I guess. I haven't been following it much, just hearing from friends that are. There are a plethora of alt-coins that they keep hyping to me as well. It still seems like too much of a pyramid or Ponzi scheme to me. I'm content being a luddite and using my GPUs for playing video games.
 
Ethereum has been going proof-of-stake for years, so until it actually happens, there is still money to be made I guess. I haven't been following it much, just hearing from friends that are. There are a plethora of alt-coins that they keep hyping to me as well. It still seems like too much of a pyramid or Ponzi scheme to me. I'm content being a luddite and using my GPUs for playing video games.
My cousin runs multiple PC's running GTX and RTX cards for mining will cash out daily. So at the moment if you make money mining then there isn't any reason to stop. The worst that can happen is that the profits of mining falls bellow the cost of electricity. Then it's a mad dash to sell your GPU's before everyone else does and crashes the market.
 
Heres something i've been saying for yaers....


Stop buying the fucking things. If theres no morons trying to pay $2k for an $800 MSRP GPU, then theres no market to sell them at that inflated price. Hell I said the same thing when NV started dropping $1000 MSRP cards. They're gonna keep doing it as long as there are morons willing to pay it.
 
Heres something i've been saying for yaers....


Stop buying the fucking things. If theres no morons trying to pay $2k for an $800 MSRP GPU, then theres no market to sell them at that inflated price. Hell I said the same thing when NV started dropping $1000 MSRP cards. They're gonna keep doing it as long as there are morons willing to pay it.
It's only moronic depending on your financial situation. For some, paying the extra but isn't a big deal and they want it now, not a year from now.
 
Heres something i've been saying for yaers....


Stop buying the fucking things. If theres no morons trying to pay $2k for an $800 MSRP GPU, then theres no market to sell them at that inflated price. Hell I said the same thing when NV started dropping $1000 MSRP cards. They're gonna keep doing it as long as there are morons willing to pay it.
The catch is that there is a RoI on these for miners. It doesn’t matter what the actually cost of the card is when you’re using it to make money - all that matters is how long it takes to recover the purchase price and start turning a profit.
 
If it is just a little more and the item on eBay is "good has new" (outside the obvious getting in a bid war, lack of information from the above), different taxation than for a new item ?

I always find it strange for most item to even close to the store price, warranties/return/possible issue wise and so on wise make it seem not worth it.
A lot of people buying from scalper sellers on Newegg, Amazon, eBay, etc don’t realize that most of the GPU manufacturers only honor warranty if you bought the thing through an authorized seller. So if it isn’t sold/shipped by Amazon, Newegg, etc you’re hosed if the card fails. This is why IMO, Amazon and Newegg should be punished in some form for allowing GPUs to be sold on their marketplace without giant warnings. Not to mention them profiting from this scalping nonsense and enabling it to begin with.
 
Heres something i've been saying for yaers....


Stop buying the fucking things. If theres no morons trying to pay $2k for an $800 MSRP GPU, then theres no market to sell them at that inflated price. Hell I said the same thing when NV started dropping $1000 MSRP cards. They're gonna keep doing it as long as there are morons willing to pay it.

Well obviously someone with a lot of money and value them is not a moron for buying them, people that mine has well, the big data and other industrial use type, people that need them for their workstation or streamer's, we end up with a long list, almost exact the same has the list of the people that bought them.
 
Well obviously someone with a lot of money and value them is not a moron for buying them, people that mine has well, the big data and other industrial use type, people that need them for their workstation or streamer's, we end up with a long list, almost exact the same has the list of the people that bought them.
People with money/industry buy A100's. Not 3090's.
 
People with money/industry buy A100's. Not 3090's.

I am not sure how much it matters what exact product that move out of TSMC/Samsung space those companies have here, would they not make the one that sales at ridiculous price (and if not once they are out of A100 people moving to next best thing)?

The idea that someone is a moron to pay a price above MSRP because they do not understand that if no one in the world would do it (including people for whom it made a giant amount of sense they pay 3 times the price of the cards with the mining situation), the price would go down to the MSRP level and impossible to buy outside making a bot that find one, so it would be better for them, seem a gross simplification.
 
I am not sure how much it matters what exact product that move out of TSMC/Samsung space those companies have here, would they not make the one that sales at ridiculous price (and if not once they are out of A100 people moving to next best thing)?

The idea that someone is a moron to pay a price above MSRP because they do not understand that if no one in the world would do it (including people for whom it made a giant amount of sense they pay 3 times the price of the cards with the mining situation), the price would go down to the MSRP level and impossible to buy outside making a bot that find one, so it would be better for them, seem a gross simplification.
The fact that an A100 costs $25k doesn't matter to the people buying it. You're talking federal contracts, massive banks, etc. And BTW, that's not 'scalpers'. That's just what it costs to buy from a Vendor like CDW.

The point here, is don't blame that market for how expensive the consumer GPU's are. It's an entirely different market.

But personally, this is why i'm all for hardware LHR locks on the consumer products. If you've got a real need to do hashing, go buy a $25k A100, or even older V100's. If hashing was completely crippled on these consumer products to where it made absolutely zero sense for miners to buy them, this problem wouldn't be as bad. By crippled I mean even more of a LHR crippling then nvidia is doing now. Like to the point where last-gen shit without it would do better.

Of course, neither AMD or nvidia would ever do it to that point. The reality is they love this scarcity on the consumer products. It allows them to jack up the prices and rake the cash in.
 
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The fact that an A100 costs $25k doesn't matter to the people buying it. You're talking federal contracts, massive banks, etc. And BTW, that's not 'scalpers'. That's just what it costs to buy from a Vendor like CDW.

The point here, is don't blame that market for how expensive the consumer GPU's are. It's an entirely different market.

But personally, this is why i'm all for hardware LHR locks on the consumer products. If you've got a real need to do hashing, go buy a $25k A100, or even older V100's. If hashing was completely crippled on these consumer products to where it made absolutely zero sense for miners to buy them, this problem wouldn't be as bad. By crippled I mean even more of a LHR crippling then nvidia is doing now. Like to the point where last-gen shit without it would do better.

Of course, neither AMD or nvidia would ever do it to that point. The reality is they love this scarcity on the consumer products. It allows them to jack up the prices and rake the cash in.
My pricing on an A100 (PCIe) is closer to $13,000 CAD after taxes. But yes they are completely different markets with differently binned and batched silicon.

The LHR stuff is a stopgap, little more, yes it may cause miners to pause on their purchases but as long as stores run garbage web security and no bottling countermeasures scalpers are more than happy to buy them all up to resell them as long as there are people out there willing to pay their prices they will continue to supply the demand.
 
I remember bidding on an Ebay item once and some idiots took it like 4X over the actual value of the item because of a bidding war. (Got the same item the next week for the MSRP on another listing) See it all the time on there. People will bid outrageously high to win the auction even if the same item is cheaper on another listing.
As i've said in other posts, i paid about $300-400 over MSRP for my 3090 from Ebay, but since the prices have been sky-high going into 2 years now i'm sorta glad i did. Prices are still too insane.
 
I remember bidding on an Ebay item once and some idiots took it like 4X over the actual value of the item because of a bidding war. (Got the same item the next week for the MSRP on another listing) See it all the time on there. People will bid outrageously high to win the auction even if the same item is cheaper on another listing.
As i've said in other posts, i paid about $300-400 over MSRP for my 3090 from Ebay, but since the prices have been sky-high going into 2 years now i'm sorta glad i did. Prices are still too insane.

Check out the shopgoodwill website for some truly crazy bidding wars, sunk-cost-fallacy, irrational escalation of commitment, etc etc. I've seen PC components there go for well over their typical ebay asking price. It is nuts because there is no buyer protection with shopgoodwill. Sure, you can probably get money back for something destroyed in shipping - but the items are all as-is and many parts are even untested!
 
A lot of people buying from scalper sellers on Newegg, Amazon, eBay, etc don’t realize that most of the GPU manufacturers only honor warranty if you bought the thing through an authorized seller. So if it isn’t sold/shipped by Amazon, Newegg, etc you’re hosed if the card fails. This is why IMO, Amazon and Newegg should be punished in some form for allowing GPUs to be sold on their marketplace without giant warnings. Not to mention them profiting from this scalping nonsense and enabling it to begin with.
If you buy it on Amazon or Newegg's website, the warranty should be intact. Even if its one of their marketplace sellers.

The real trouble is a place like StockX or Ebay. I would only buy EVGA cards from those places. Because EVGA will warranty the card. The warranty starts from the day it shipped out of their factory. Rather than your purchase date.

YMMV with any other brand. I know AMD's reference cards explicitly state they don't honor warranty if purchased from an unauthorized seller.
 
If you buy it on Amazon or Newegg's website, the warranty should be intact. Even if its one of their marketplace sellers.

The real trouble is a place like StockX or Ebay. I would only buy EVGA cards from those places. Because EVGA will warranty the card. The warranty starts from the day it shipped out of their factory. Rather than your purchase date.

YMMV with any other brand. I know AMD's reference cards explicitly state they don't honor warranty if purchased from an unauthorized seller.
The warranty language for PNY, MSI, etc is 'authorized reseller' so if you can't produce an invoice with Newegg/Amazon as the actual seller.. I'd be concerned.

And yeah, EVGA is the best choice here for warranty for that reason, but they're also the hardest to get since it has the highest profit margin for scalpers.
 
The warranty language for PNY, MSI, etc is 'authorized reseller' so if you can't produce an invoice with Newegg/Amazon as the actual seller.. I'd be concerned.

And yeah, EVGA is the best choice here for warranty for that reason, but they're also the hardest to get since it has the highest profit margin for scalpers.
The invoice will be Amazon or Newegg. If their marketplace sellers created issues for warranties, I feel like it would have been a widespread news item. Although....Maybe I missed that memo?!
 
It's only moronic depending on your financial situation. For some, paying the extra but isn't a big deal and they want it now, not a year from now.
But those who have the disposable income to drop on an overpriced GPU should realize that it's bad for the PC industry as a whole—particularly the gaming industry—if GPUs become luxury items soley for those with fat wallets. Miners, of course, don't care.
 
BB would have made a lot more money from TT sign-ups if they had announced this early. Give time for new users to register.
As it stands they just gave a ton of cards to existing TT owners and pushed away a bunch of potential new ones.
 
except common sense....
Common sense would be realizing when an individual who simply wants to use a card does it, they're adding $200 to the price of the card they want. These scalpers buying 20 cards at a shot are adding $10 to the cost of each card on average, which is still well within their profit margin and each time BB does one of these drops behind a paywall that price added per card drops each time since the subscription is for the whole year. Now THAT is common sense.
 
Common sense would be realizing when an individual who simply wants to use a card does it, they're adding $200 to the price of the card they want. These scalpers buying 20 cards at a shot are adding $10 to the cost of each card on average, which is still well within their profit margin and each time BB does one of these drops behind a paywall that price added per card drops each time since the subscription is for the whole year. Now THAT is common sense.
come back and tell me this when you have to have a subscription service to buy everything...
 
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