Timing the PS3 market

Timing the PS3 market

Well for those of you that didn’t know the new video game console from Sony came out last week, it’s called the Playstation 3, and well I’ve got 3 of them in my basement.  It meant sitting outside a store for about 19 hours, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to sell the three consoles on Ebay for enough money to make my little adventure worth while.

This is the first time I have done anything like this as far as trying to play the arbitrage game with a hot item, but after watching what happened after the Xbox 360 launch last year, and all the reports of PS3 shortages I figured it might be worth a try.  Well after getting home Friday morning from the launch I was pleasently surprised to see PS3s going on Ebay for quite a bit of money.  There were a lot of false bids, but it would be safe to say that they were going for about $6k on average for a good part of that day.

Anyway I’m going to stick with my initial plan here and hope that the supply keeps going down and demand going up making for a good selling opportunity closer to Christmas.   I’ll keep you posted on my success or failure with this project.

Well I had decided that before this that I wasn’t going to sell my PS3s until right before Christmas as that is when the Xbox 360 seem to be commanding the largest $$$ last year.  Well as expected the PS3s on Ebay are going for considerably less than they were on launch day, probably about $900 per console, which at that price isn’t worth the effort as the PS3 costs about $650 after taxes and then you add in eBay and Paypal fees it’s pretty much a wash, or at least a bad excuse to sit outside a Walmart for 19 hours in Wisconsin in the fall.