eBay Is Trying But Struggling To Stop The Onslaught Of SNES Mini Scalpers

Burn them all I say. Human filth!

Are scalpers = Modern pirates ?

@Xaessya Hahaha!

At least they're trying. They should just ban the words "SNES Mini" and "Pre-order" until like late August. There; problem solved

eBay and the businesses that gave the preorders should work together and have these scalpers' preorders "randomly" cancelled.

Shameful

Most people love to put all the blame on Nintendo, and they have a portion to be sure. But as far as I am concerned, scalpers are scum akin to drug dealers. I don't think there is a reasonable way to outlaw the practice, and I don't think in terms of the law that it should even be attempted. But that said, I think scalpers are dirty, greedy, selfish people.

The only people who annoy me more, are the ones who buy a new console just to smash it on YouTube. I once saw a guy, back last gen who bought a new Wii, 360 and PS3 just to smash them on YouTube and laugh at anyone who couldn't find or afford the systems.

I'd volunteer. Im surprised a script isn't in place to remove them just as quickly as they go up.

@duddy There would be no way to collate their data like that without violating data protection laws.

Even though it'll likely just delay the inevitable it's good to see them try something to discourage scalpers.

There should really be a law that prohibit anyone from selling or re-selling brand new items (NES Mini and SNES Mini) above their MSRP like maybe wait until the system is out five years before they can rise the price to resell it. Make it so anyone who is caught doing this practice will be charge a fine or get arrested. This way people won't be able to scalp customer for more money.

Pre-order culture needs to die and corporations need to stop offering pre-orders. Walk your butt into a store on launch day (or place your online order on launch day). Pre-orders just make life easier for scalpers.

@duddy

Easier said than done. Retailers have to prove that the eBay users are selling their pre-order before said retailers can cancel pre-orders. Most retailers and Ebay also can not simply match billing addresses due to most privacy policies. They can only do so if said seller it breaking any laws, and scalping is unfortunately not a federal law.

@Anti-Matter

Nah. Pirates didn't legally purchase their stuff.

@Crono1973

What? There's nothing wrong with pre-orders and scalpers in the US screwed people over despite the fact that we weren't allowed to have pre-orders for the NES Mini. So there's your theory instantly busted.

@Heavyarms55
It's easy to get annoyed by these things, but the truth is, if people weren't willing to buy at the Scalper prices, there wouldn't be a problem. Even with the last Zelda Amiibo batch, they sold out in an instant and now people are happily paying twice the RRP for them. If we weren't willing to pay the price, scalpers can't survive.

this is human nature all over, an extreme example is ivory. What good is ivory, why would anyone want it, what use does it have that can't be sought elsewhere? Those questions don't matter because as long as people are willing to pay for it, others will go to extremes to supply it.

We really have to also be aware of the problem of those that enable scalping.

Those that uncritically pay far more than the MSRP to some nobody, just because they can't be arsed to look for an item for very long, or can't stomach to go without.

If nobody did this, scalping wouldn't exist.

@Tempestryke On the flip side, enabling pre-orders for the SNES Classic didn't stop the scalpers after the availability problems for the NES Classics like many claimed it would. It just made it worse IMO as it's easier to pre-order than to walk into a store and buy one on launch day.

Yes, pre-ordering has lots of problems. For one thing, it makes it almost impossible to find great products on launch day for normal consumers and it also encourages developers to ship broken games. Content being withheld from games to offer as pre-order bonuses is terrible as well. That pre-ordering is now the default for everything video game related is beyond stupid and it's affecting the entire industry.

@Pod Yes, the people who waited around for Nintendo to produce more NES Classics so as not to support the scalpers sure hurt those scalpers didn't they? Nintendo is as much to blame for the shortage of NES Classics as scalpers are and we have yet to see if the same will happen again.

Nintendo made their own bed with this. While I appreciate ebay trying to stop the scalpers, it would have never happened as badly in the first place if Nintendo didn't brain fart their production of the NES Classic. The precedent is set, and the SNES will follow suit even if more are made. If you could have actually gone to the store with a half decent shot at getting one on the shelf, then the scalper prices wouldn't have been as insane. They will always exist, but Nintendo is largely to blame for how ridiculous this has gotten.

@buildz

E-bay are not trying to do anything against scalpers,all they are saying is you can scalp for any price as long as you list the item within 30 days of the release date !!.

If E-bay were serious they would put a limit of how much sellers could charge over the recommended price.

To be clear, eBay isn't trying to fight Scalpers. The policy states that you can't sell pre orders, so in the case of the SNES mini they are enforcing their policy not fighting Scalpers. Once the thing is released it will be a free for all.

The only real way to end the scalping is for the morons to quit buying at inflated prices. That would force the Scalpers to sell at near retail and it would become to much work for little profit so they would stop.

Wait, so the hero most commonly known for slaying Hydra is now Captain America? What kind of world do we live in now...

@HipsterInkling see even the ebay pre-orders have sold out

@johnvboy and @Destron exactly!

For the record, I have one on pre-order but if it's value becomes pushed up by the same class of rich, greedy, impatient, gotta-have-it-all buyers as the NES mini then I won't be able to justify keeping something that I could sell for £200.

Many people make money by buying and selling on ebay. Some make a little extra to help with the bills, some make a living out of it. By the nature of the business they can only sell at what the market will pay and there's no shame in that. It's no different from any other reseller and you can hardly blame them for choosing not to ignore a profitable product.

Cases such as the NES mini are such a vulgur demonstration of idiot panic buying that I'm happy to see the buyers 'scalped' again. Though no one's forcing them - they're setting their own prices. It's an absolute disgrace imo, but at least the biggest losers are themselves.

If my snes mini becomes too valuable I'll go without, and sell it to one of the many people who seem to have lost the ability to do that.

Japan didn't have this much trouble with the Famicom mini btw. It's not like you can even blame Nintendo for this.

The whole scalpers = badguys / desperate buyers = goodguys vision is always amusing, but the idea of ebay trying but struggling to stop scalpers is downright hilarious.

Good job eBay! Show the filthy scalpers of what's business is about. Should've done it earlier for NES Classic Edition.

lol

Ebay never helped before with the nes classic mini, recommended setting the price for 300 dollars.

Suddenly now they care about the rampant scalping?
Too late numbskulls, should have started with the nes classic mini scalping not exacerbate the situation.

@Anti-Matter I thought they were the new robber barons?

i bought a house 15 years ago and sold it and nearly tripled my money. I. Ought the house as a investment and knew I would be selling it.

Scalpers is not the problem.

It's not a high margin product. It's cool but a bit of a niche. I expect half the Western buyers don't even want it that much, they just got caught up in the weeing contest and haven't yet even switched it on. I think they genuinely didn't expect a cashnado and wanted a bit of fun with a limited edition special item, as they frequently have in the past.

And no business wants to overproduce something, ever. I simply think they completely underestimated Western idiocy when they picked a number.

@BinaryFragger

Preach my friend, preach. You know what? I wouldn't even know what a real one looks like, if I hadn't gone to the Nintendo Store in New York where they had one in the display case museum. Of course they didn't have any available to buy cause, you know, they made 20 of them and said, "yeah that's good." The stock problem was so bad, that a lot of stores in my area didn't even have shelf space reserved for it.

Nintendo is entirely 100% to blame for this imo. If they would just make sufficient stock, there would be zero problems in the first place. It's literally guaranteed to sell millions upon millions. People are beyond ready to give Nintendo their money. Same goes for basically all amiibo, especially the Zelda ones. It's not like severely limiting stock is doing Nintendo any good, at all, as they're not the ones profiting off of inflated retail and resellers' prices - they're guaranteed to sell every single unit they're able to put out anyway. :/ And that's not even talking about the terrible PR image, Nintendo's supply issues are a laughing stock worldwide, and have been for a long time.

eBay is not trying to stop scalpers. They are trying to stop pre-orders more than 30 days out. The reason has nothing to do with nobility, they LOVE scalpers because eBay gets like 10% of every sale. They WANT it to go for big $$.

The only thing they don't like here is that if a customer doesn't get a shipment within 30 days they can open a case and it gives eBay headaches. Of course, no one will get their snes mini in 30 days if they order today.

All eBay is really saying is, wait a bit before you supply the demand.

"Cheeky" is not the word that starts with a "C" that I would use to describe these...yeah pretty much any word I'd use would get me banned for extreme language...

@CB85 Depends who you listen to. Didn't they sell about 10 million Amiibos in the first three months? Who could have predicted such extreme demand, honestly? They multiplied their manufacturing arrangements and they did well to keep up. Stories circulated of Disney criticising them for false scarcity... Disney! The company who famously created genuine false scarcity for videotapes and DVDs!

The first rule of business is don't overproduce. It's a quick road to bankruptcy. They need to pick a number which they predict will 'just' fill demand. They're doing an okay job with the Switch considering the unexpected numbers that's moving.

The NES mini is interesting. 1, because the resale prices are actually dropping now, which is a sign that perhaps they did make close to enough to fill most demand, but so many got bought up and held back by people, staff, and high street shops themselves when they saw the moronic prices customers were willing to pay.

And 2, because it's actually an item that Nintendo always said was going to be limited. Turns out many people can't accept that.

Westerners just don't like being told 'no, you can't have it'. It puts us into a money throwing rage. Look at some of the angry comments at the start of this thread alone. I guess Nintendo needs telling that Limited Edition is another thing that they're not allowed to do here. :-/

Again, the Famicom Minis didn't have near this problem. In fact you can still import them now for near RRP! Isn't that alone a pretty clear indicator?

While this practice clearly annoys some people, most seem to overlook the fact that this is EXACTLY the same business practice that any company or person undertakes to make money. Buy low, sell high.

Nintendo, Sony, whoever they all do the exact same thing so why can't these people make profit in the same manner?

Also consider Nintendo with their latest console as an example. The accessories are ridiculously overpriced according to most gamers. The profit margin on something like the Switch dock is probably 100% but because they are a company rather than individual for some reason nobody cares or accepts the price as the true value without questioning it. Bizarre.

Lastly, you could place equal blame on Nintendo for these prices. If they actually stocked the market to meet demand then third party sellers couldn't demand such high prices (as anybody would be able to go to a retailer and pay RRP).

@HSuzumiyaVI and they are not helping now, they are just enforcing their policy that has always been there. Once the system launches it will be just like the NES mini.

BTW those prices eBay recommends when you list an item are automated based on what the item is typically selling for. So that wasn't eBay saying hey screw these guys good, that was the average selling price of the system at the time, buyers set that suggested price not eBay.

They are not fighting scalpers. The Scalpers are their best customer. Hell the even loosened the restriction for them. Now they can sell less than 30 days out, the policy used to be absolutely no pre order sales, you had to have the item in hand to list it.

@datamonkey Right you are, but sadly I don't think they'll read this far. In many ways I envy the simple outlook, bless them.

The only thing that the market's really communicated to Nintendo is that they sold Limited Edition Mini Console 1 too cheaply and ironically, in this case Nintendo chose not to listen.

@buildz What will that do to everybody who wants to buy a snes mini because it's a good way to find a 1chip console?

That's why I bought my snes mini recently, because I knew that as soon as the snes classic edition was released, it would be impossible to find a snes mini on eBay. I knew that searches for "snes mini" would suddenly be nothing but the modern emulation console and not the mini version of the original SNES console.

I'm pretty sure it's in Ebay's rights to disallow any product they do not want sold on their sight. Why can't they search "Snes mini" themselves and take them all down. Maybe even temporarily banning scalpers who list them more than once. Makes sense to me.

@MortalKombat2007 True but, Ebay also reserves the right to ban any product they don't want sold on their digital storefront. If they really cared they could just ban Snes Mini sales and be done with it.

Why don't they just ban the item for one year. Period. No selling it until its lifted and any attempts will result in a permanent Mac address ban, along with a hefty fine.

If eBay teamed up with Nintendo and Amazon to come up with a way to swat these flies permanently I think it would be money well spent for the future of our industry. This subject would make for a good Think Tank project as well.

"Let us know what you think of these cheeky SNES Mini scalpers with a comment below."

Now there's a loaded sentence if ever I heard one!

Good on them. Perfectly fine to make a profit, and it draws attention to Nintendo's idiotic policy of limiting supply.

@aesc

Your landlord bought your house - he didn't "do nothing".

@Mart1ndo ... nice try, you. But you should probably have figured it out I am referring tot he people who bought 10 NES classic edition and then sold them at twice the price to desperate parent who wanted to show their children what video games looked like when they were young. Since I fear the same exact thing will occur in September, it is YOU who can go live in North Korea and you will feel right at home since you are attempting to justify such greedy behavior. To you I bid good day sir.

@Crono1973
It's not a "shortage" if they never actually were going to make more.

Then it was just a limited release product.

Of course Nintendo is to blame for not making as many units as people would like to buy, but it is entirely their own decision how much of something they want to make. It's a free market. They don't actually HAVE to fulfill demand.

People who resell mass produced consumer goods at higher prices and those that enable them can have their own party. In my eyes this doesn't really reflect poorly on the manufacturer.

@Pod Nintendo discontinud the NES Classic to start production of the SNES Classic. Will they do the same thing to the SNES Classic? How many times would it have to happen before you would hold Nintendo accountable for helping scalpers?

@aesc There's great debate to be had over the negatives of capitalism, and the power it gives to money. Litigation? Pharmaceuticals? Diamond trade? But well, there's not many good alternatives so here we are.

This kind of scalping, enabled by the internet, isn't close to being the worst of capitalism. In fact I argue the opposite. A lot of these sellers truly need money. I know I certainly did back when I used a months wages and a loan to import 20 Japanese FW1.0 PSPs when there was a desperate rush to buy them. It was a gamble (I have kids, and needed a return asap), but a fairly sensible one (I figured worst case, if the value crashed, I'd recoup 80% of my money back, provided not too many had an awful amount of dead pixels). Do you think people who don't need money bother going to this trouble? I'm certain nearly every Mini NES sold on ebay has been bought by someone richer than the seller. That's the interesting thing about the reach provided by the internet - the financial shift - and this is about the smallest imaginable example.

Btw, @Shiryu "desperate parent who wanted to show their children what video games looked like when they were young". Haha! Brilliant!

Willingly paying three times rrp (before it's even released in many cases) is a disgusting use of money. Especially so for a parent. These buyers are spoilt privileged people who never learned to go without.

Desperate? What a joke. Show them a youtube video, or buy a VC game or a cheap old NES, or here's a really shocking thought, tell the kids, sorry - couldn't get one.

Remember, with both these mini consoles, buyers have shown they want to pay £200 BEFORE the shortage has even started. What do you think that's going to do to the remaining stock?

Think of the number of Mini Snes units that would be enough to meet demand, triple it, add a million, and there'd still be morons over paying on ebay, and consequently people buying up the RRP stock.

It's entirely the buyers' doing.

@Crono1973
It doesn't matter how many times. Nintendo are not "helping" scalpers.

There's a complete disconnect between the two events of producing an amount of systems sold at a fixed price through trusted retail partners, and opportunists buying out these products in bulk and reselling to sufficiently uncritical consumers.

whilst I agree its annoying to see items like this become open to people exploting on ebay, I think banning this is too extreme and other the top. there are other things that can be done like limiting to 1 per customer which would mean even with multiple accounts surely people couldn't buy as many? also its the people that buy these inflated process that are to blame not the ebay sellers. if your prepared to pay £300 for an item that costs £70 then you simply cannot moan about it. no one is forcing you to buy this item at this price. if people didn't buy these items then this culture wouldn't exist. everyone has to make a living and if people are prepared to pay higher for a desirable item then you cant blame ebayer sellers. the blame is down to how retailers let these people buy multiple items and not limiting them and people who buy these expensive items are just as much to blame.

@Pod Willfully limiting supply when you know that it's helping scalpers is not innocent on Nintendo's part. Example, if I willfully leave bacon grease on the burner with the burner on high and leave the house there is a 100% chance that it will eventually catch fire and burn my house down. Now I knew this would happen so am I still innocent?

If we see a repeat of the NES Mini because Nintendo willfully limits supply, they can't claim to not have forseen the result.

@aesc Donating your Snes to a children's hospital games room is a great idea. Last time I went to one they had an old Xbox with a bunch of discs that didn't work. Cartridges still have a purpose. My kids love the snes, the Mario games are timeless.

You're right that using MyNintendo to distribute preorder tickets would work. Club Nintendo was full of limited edition items and club distribution would probably make people more accepting that it's a fun limited product for fans. It's surprising they didn't.

I still don't think we should expect much responsibility from retailers, they just want to shift product. The one per customer thing is more of a calculated move. They're going to sell out anyway so can afford to make a gesture to help raise customer satisfaction a little.

Ebay dont care whatsoever by the way. The pre-order thing is just a rule due to the fact that there's a set limited period after the sale date until ebay close avenues of contact and complaint. 90 days I think. Ebay just need sales completed well within that time frame. They're of course happy for members to resell whatever they legally want to.

To be honest I think this headline is intentionally misleading just to encourage this debate we're having.

such a wonderful organised launch from nintendo, with americans not able to order, stores in uk getting stocks for a minute then out of stock then few hours stock for another minute, with all the people who cannot get an order, such great organisation.

If I had made a pre-order, and saw that people would pay double or triple price for it, I would also sell it. I suspect most would. I think scalpers are not creating a problem. The problem is Nintendo does not want to make money, thus there are not enough of these things. The price will be the same in the end whether scalpers are the ones selling, or just people who change their mind. It is probably lower considering a few people would not bother or know how to sell it again.

Being really angry and publicly wishing bad things on scalpers though, that is a problem in my opinion.

@Crono1973
Did you just make a food analogy?

@Pod Sort of but it was mostly about a fire, are you hungry?

@retro_player_22 As much as its pretty douchey you cant make the idea of buying something and then selling it illegal... GAME in the UK who is one of the 3 main retailers are selling it for £10 above everyone else... its douchey but you cant make reselling illegal the whole world would fall apart. And equally the resources it would cost to enforce that would be astronomical and not even vaguely viable. Police officers regularly turn a blind eye to drugs, illegal gambling and prostitution due to lack of time and resources... they are not going to go after someone reselling a video games console... I agree with the sentiment but the ball really needs to be in Nintendo's court to make enough of them so reselling isn't viable.

@pubjoe In the UK Sony distributed preorder tickets for the PS2. All of the preorders were done through Sony rather than individual stores. I seem to remember it worked quite well

@Crono1973
A little bit. In any case, I get what you're saying, but Nintendo can't actively fight the scalpers themselves, only the retailers can.

@Pod They can meet demand instead of discontinuing it when they know they haven't met demand.

@Crono1973
It's not their job to meet demand.

@Pod It is if they don't wish to enrich scalpers.

Much like Captain America has found when trying to take out the force of Hydra - "If a head is cut off, two more shall take its place" - so eBay is struggling to deal with the many scalpers that are attempting to sell pre-orders for the Super NES Classic Edition, which is against eBay's terms and conditions.
Not a good analogy when we see that Captain America has been consumed by Hydra and is now one of them. Hope ebay doesn't scalp.

I remember seeing a guy on ebay having a huge pyramid of nothing but Switch units piled up. Far as I know, Ebay did nothing to stop that guy and he alone had about 30+ units in that pic.

Meanwhile people like me had to drive 2 hours to the only store that still had one left and pray to the gods that no one snatched it up before we could get to it.

@Crono1973
It is not their responsibility whether scalpers are enriched.