Forem: Michael Driscoll

A Brief Overdrive Library Analysis

Michael Driscoll — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 02:01:03 +0000

In 2021 I realized that if I switched my podcast listening to audiobooks, I could dramatically increase the number of books I've "read" each month. Initially I was going to use Audible but remembered my good local library, the Chicago Public Library, had to have offerings and I was not disappointed. It had over 17,000 audiobooks! But being the curious data analyst I am, I was curious how the CPL compared to other libaries out there. Turns out despite being the 3rd largest city in the US, it has the 116th largest eBook/Audiobook library! To get the full inventory I scraped Overdrive to see if there were any interesting trends in the data. I wrote a basic script to iterate over Overdrive's websiteids to get the following data points:

Total number of items by type of item and category (Fiction/Non-Fiction, Juvenile/Young Adult/Regular, as well as by specific category like mystery, romance, etc...)
Called Google's API to determine the state/country of each library
Included for the sake of comparison Overdrive's listing of their 1+ million checkout libraries to get an idea of any relation between size of collection and number of checkouts
For the top libraries, I checked their websites to see if there was a means for non-residents to get access and updated mobileread's wiki with the details, see bottom
Complete Data - Sort by state,

The top ten libraries with the largest collections on Overdrive:

Library Name	State	Country	Million Checkouts	ALL FORMATS Total	EBOOKS Total	AUDIOBOOKS Total
Los Angeles Public Library	CA	US	10 million checkouts	543,578	430,459	108,737
Sno-Isle Libraries	WA	US	3 million checkouts	398,988	276,404	118,200
National Library Board Singapore	Singapore	SG	9 million checkouts	325,885	273,265	50,916
Livebrary.com	NY	US	3 million checkouts	322,971	239,358	83,612
King County Library System	WA	US	7 million checkouts	298,932	221,054	73,541
CLEVNET	OH	US	4 million checkouts	295,941	220,797	70,770
MELSA: Twin Cities Metro eLibrary	MN	US	9 million checkouts	293,978	231,353	58,980
Auckland Libraries	Auckland	NZ	3 million checkouts	291,148	225,285	63,534
Toronto Public Library	ON	CA	9 million checkouts	277,630	223,346	51,019

Some interesting observations on the data:

The best deal for non-residents is to get the Brooklyn Public Library card for $50/year. The tenth largest library on Overdrive and many other libraries charge much more than this.
Many libraries allow access to anyone who lives in the state, for instance several of the largest libraries in California, Washington, Ohio, New York, Texas are this way. It's worth checking the libraries in your state to see if they offer any reciprocal memberships.
The libraries with the highest proportion of their collections being audiobooks are those for the blind, such as Listening Books, National Council for the Blind of Ireland, or Christian Record Services for the Blind which when one thinks isn't too surprising, but then there's also the Inglewood Public Library with 48k audiobooks making up 74% of its collection
Libraries with the highest proportion of their collection as Fiction (w/ a total collection of over 1000 books): Itochu Chemical Frontier Corporation - 99.98%, Stadtbibliothek Wuppertal 99.6%, Izumiya Workers Union - 99.4%
Libraries with the highest proportion of their collection as Non-Fiction (w/ a total collection of over 1000 books): DPEP Tech & Digital Knowledge Center, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Better Health Library, Marine Institute, Nisshin Seifun Labor Union, Azusa Sekkei Co., Ltd, Newschool of Architecture and Design, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (all 100% of their collections)
Libraries with the highest proportion of their collection as Juvenile/Young Adult (w/ a total collection of over 1000 books): NC Kids Digital Library (98.9%), Fujian Juvenile & Children's Library (98.1%), Jiangsu Children's Digital Library (96.1%)

If anyone wants to run the scraping script: Scraping Script

Kellogg/Booth Interview Questions

Michael Driscoll — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 15:57:28 +0000

I'm sure this is a very unusual blog post for this site, but as I was recently admitted to Booth and Kellogg's Part-Time MBA programs, I wanted to publicly share some resources I made for myself in preparation for the interviews.

First off shout out to gmatclub's interview debriefs, I relied heavily on those to get an idea of what questions might be asked of me. I copied all the questions from the debriefs from both schools into separate spreadsheets going back two years, removed duplicates, sorted into categories, and then by how often those questions were asked.

There seemed to be seven main categories of questions:

Professional History/Background
MBA/School
Goals
Behavioral
Teamwork
Leadership
Wrap-up

The specific questions in those tended to change per interview, but there were certainly some that were more frequent that others. In particular, there are a key set of questions which looked to be guaranteed to be asked (in some wording)

Walk me through your resume/career history
Why do you want an MBA? And why is now the right time to get one?
Why this school?
What are your short and long term career goals?
Some question about your experience on a team
Some question about your leadership experience
Asking if you have questions for the interviewer

But within each category I found there were a common set of questions, as listed below. I've marked them by whether the question was only asked by Booth, Kellogg, or both schools and a prioritization, a semi-subjective, semi-quantified ordering of how important having a good answer to that question is based on how frequently it's asked. If I were to redo this I would have kept track of the numbers explicitly.

1. Professional History/Background
Basically a getting to know you overall, an elevator pitch of your history professionally and academically. You will certainly be asked something along these lines.

School	Priority	Questions
Both	1	Walk me through your resume/background (undergrad/work history/background in general, very much looking for why you chose those jobs/companies/industries/roles/left job) Be able to pick one or two bullets to talk about in detail. Expect follow ups about various roles/bullets. How has your experience changed over time/how have you evolved over time? How have your day-to-day/responsibilities changed over time
Both	1	What clubs/organizations do you see yourself getting involved in at Kellogg/Booth? (Usually quite a bit of digging into this one)
Both	2	Tell me about yourself? (not just resume walkthrough) - Basically 30 second elevator pitch
Both	2	Why those jobs/companies?
Kellogg	2	Why did you change roles/industries? And/or Why did you not change jobs (if been in same role for a while)? (Generally looking to explain your job history in detail)
Kellogg	2	Why that major/school?
Both	3	Tell me something about you not on your resume
Kellogg	3	Tell me a story from either your childhood, young adult days or from recent time that had an impact on you.(some follow up questions on this)
Kellogg	3	What are your responsibilities at work/in your current role? What's day to day like? What is your current team like? Do you have direct reports?
Kellogg	3	What do you like most about your job? What do you dislike?
Kellogg	3	What extracurriculars do you have? What do you do when not working?
Kellogg	3	What was your favorite work experience in the jobs you held? Least Favorite?
Kellogg	4	If you could redo, would you change your career path?
Kellogg	4	If you started a startup, why?
Kellogg	4	Tell me about international experiences you have had
Kellogg	4	What geography do you want to work in?
Booth	5	How did pursuing a career in {YOUR_FIELD} help you with your people skills?
Booth	5	How do you give back to the community outside of the professional side - Volunteer work
Booth	5	Tell me about a professional failure
Booth	5	Tell me about a professional success
Booth	5	What did you learn from your volunteering experience?
Booth	5	What were the insights you gathered through {xyz major project/role}?
Booth	5	Where do you think you have generated the most impact, professionally or personally?

2. MBA/School
Again, you will 100% be asked questions from this section, you should have an answer as to why you are wanting to get an MBA and attend that specific school. After that there's going to be other questions about the school specifically often.

School	Priority	Questions
Both	1	Why do you want to attend Kellogg/Booth specifically? What convinced you to apply to Kellogg/Booth? (These reasons should be unique to Kellogg/Booth, if reason x also applies to other school why not that school? Should be genuine and show deeper research than just what you can find online)
Both	1	Why MBA? Why now? Why Weekend/Full-Time/Executive/1-Year MBA?
Both	1	What courses and professors at Kellogg/Booth? Why? (Usually quite a bit of digging into this one, basically need to show research on Kellogg/Booth)
Both	2	How will you contribute/give back/get involved at Kellogg/Booth?
Kellogg	2	How will you differentiate yourself at Kellogg/Booth? How will you stand out? What do you bring to Kellogg/Booth that's unique?
Both	3	What will be your biggest challenge at Kellogg/Booth?
Kellogg	3	What is a strength + weakness in your application?
Both	4	What other schools have you applied to?
Kellogg	4	What will you struggle with while getting an MBA?
Booth	5	2 years from now - looking back after you graduate from Kellogg/Booth- what legacy would you have left
Booth	5	Do you visit friends who went to Kellogg/Booth?
Booth	5	How do you think you'd fit into Kellogg/Booth's culture?
Booth	5	If you attended classes, what did you think of them?
Booth	5	My view on Chicago Approach and how it will be different from education at college.
Booth	5	What professional improvement do you want to get out of an MBA?

3. Goals
A natural follow to why MBA is what your goals are going to be. You can often answer this as part of answering "Why an MBA" but if not it'll be followed up on almost certainly. Booth and Kellogg want ambitious students.

School	Priority	Questions
Both	1	Tell me about your short-term (3-5 years) and long-term (10+ years) career goals. (They should be connected and ST should lead to LT and an MBA should be crucial to these goals. Should include target companies/fields)
Both	1	How will you achieve them post-MBA?
Both	1	Why those goals/jobs/companies?
Kellogg	2	What is your plan B & C in case you can't achieve your short/long term post MBA goals?
Both	3	Do those companies recruit Kellogg/Booth students?
Kellogg	3	What if Kellogg/Booth doesn't happen?

4. Behavioral
After the above it gets far more varied and specific to the reviewer. I found that there are a large number of "behavioral" questions to get an idea of what you are like as person to see if you'll fit into the culture.

School	Priority	Questions
Both	1	What are 3 of your strengths and 3 areas for improvement/weaknesses (personally and as a leader)? According to yourself and teammates?
Both	1	What is your most significant accomplishment? (leadership/work)
Both	2	How would you describe yourself in 1-3 words?
Both	2	Tell me about a time you failed. What did you learn? (This does not need to be the same as a mistake)
Both	2	Tell me about a time you had to deal with conflict in the workplace. How did you resolve it? What did you learn?
Both	2	Tell me about a time you worked with a difficult/toxic person, how did you deal with it?
Kellogg	2	If you met a coworker after 5 years today what is the one new development in yourself that you would tell them.
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a professional setback you've had and how you navigated it
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time in your life when the situation(s) really tested your resilience and how did you overcome it ?
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time when you received constructive feedback. (sometimes asked for 2-3 times)
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time you gave critical/constructive feedback to someone
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time you had to navigate through ambiguity?
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time you had to pick yourself up and try again?
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time you were challenged (in general, as a leader, from a coworker). How did you overcome those challenges?
Kellogg	2	What is your biggest growth opportunity at the moment?
Kellogg	2	What was the most challenging assignment you have done and your learning from it.
Kellogg	3	How have you dealt with negative feedback from colleague/manager?
Kellogg	3	Tell me about a time you had to deal with diverse perspectives?
Kellogg	3	Tell me about a time you made a mistake. What did you learn?
Kellogg	3	Tell me about a time you've had difficult colleagues? How did you handle it? What did you learn?
Kellogg	3	Tell me about an impact that you made in your surroundings, industry or on people ?
Kellogg	4	How do you prioritize
Kellogg	4	Tell me about an experience when you were unsure of the outcome and how you managed it?
Kellogg	4	What are 2-3 areas you could improve on?
Booth	5	Favorite means of communication at work
Booth	5	Give me an example where things were difficult but you did the right thing.
Booth	5	Give me an example where you convinced someone in a challenging situation.
Booth	5	How did you become interested in XYZ?
Booth	5	How do you handle unfamiliar situations / tell me about a time you dealt with an unfamiliar situation (the context being that I'm looking to career switch)
Booth	5	Tell me about a time when things did not go as expected
Booth	5	Tell me about a time when you helped someone - personally
Booth	5	Tell me about a time when you helped someone - professionally
Booth	5	Tell me about a time when you received feedback that surprised you
Booth	5	Tell me about a time where your perspective on something was changed.
Booth	5	Tell me about a time you dealt with a high-stress situation
Booth	5	Tell me about a time you didn't see eye to eye with a colleague; how did you resolve it?
Booth	5	Tell me about a time you had a miscommunication with someone; how it impacted work and how you fixed it to ensure it wouldn't happen again.
Booth	5	Tell me about when you have had a disagreement with someone at work and what the outcome was.
Booth	5	What are your strengths & development areas according to your managers? Elaborate on your development area
Booth	5	What do you do for fun/hobbies/with free time?
Booth	5	What is a strength you're hoping to expand upon at Kellogg/Booth? A weakness you're hoping to improve?
Booth	5	What is the gender dynamic where you work?
Booth	5	What is the race dynamic where you work?

5. Teamwork
I then grouped a number of questions that seemed teamwork related, as business school students will work in teams at school and at work (especially Kellogg) so there's a need to see how you are in a group.

School	Priority	Questions
Kellogg	1	Tell me about a time you worked with people who were different from you (ideally in a team). Opportunities and challenges?
Kellogg	1	Walk me through a challenge that you have come across when working on a team?
Both	2	What role do you play in a group setting/group project?
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time when you worked in a diverse team, what you enjoyed, what was challenging/rewarding, what did you learn, benefits/drawbacks - Diverse could mean multicultural or something else
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time you demonstrated teamwork?
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time you worked in a team. What kind of team member are you?
Booth	3	Give me an example where you worked in a team with different point of views/opinions. How did you handle it?
Booth	3	Tell me about a time when you had to convince a team or a group of something
Booth	3	What is your ideal team?

6. Leadership
MBA students are expected to become leaders, and they want to see demonstrated experience as one before, this is a chance to talk about leadership at school and work.

School	Priority	Questions
Both	1	Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership? At work and/or everyday life?
Both	1	What is your leadership style? How has it evolved over time (particularly from undergrad to now)? What makes you a good leader? Give an example of your style.
Both	1	What kind of leader are you? / What does leadership mean to you?
Kellogg	2	Do you lead a team? Do you have any direct reports?
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time when you led a team that had people with different opinions. What was rewarding, what was challenging.
Kellogg	2	Tell me about a time you lead a team (should try to show substantial impact)
Kellogg	2	Tell me what you look for/value in a leader
Kellogg	2	What leadership strengths will you bring to Kellogg/Booth?
Kellogg	3	Tell me about a time you had to lead a team but weren't designated team lead/did not have formal leadership/had to assume leadership when it was not given to you/had to step into leadership
Kellogg	3	Tell me about a time you took a bold decision as a leader
Kellogg	3	Tell me about difficulties you find in leading a team
Booth	4	How do you make the offshore employees keep motivated considering the cultural and time difference
Booth	4	How do you manage to lead a big team of {#} people
Both	4	How would your friends/colleagues/direct reports describe you as a leader? (Sometimes just 3 words, or free response, strengths/weaknesses)
Kellogg	4	How do you manage people older/more experienced than you?
Kellogg	4	Tell me about a time you lead a team and things did no go well
Kellogg	4	Tell me about specific leadership roles and responsibilities you've held at work. Which ones did you like the most?
Kellogg	4	What are your strengths as a leader?
Kellogg	4	What challenges did you face with managing your direct reports?

7. Wrap-Up
Finally there's going to be a chance to ask questions. I highly encourage you to have some questions prepared, show your interest.

School	Priority	Questions
Both	1	Anything else I should know? Is there anything I should have asked that I have not?
Both	1	What would you like to ask me? Note: You should not ask questions that imply you have not researched the school
Booth	2	If the AdComm could be told one thing about you, what would it be?

All this prep let me do well enough on the interview to get admitted to both schools and I ultimately chose Kellogg and quite happy there!

PS5 & Xbox eBay/StockX Scalping Market - Over half a million sold for $104 million in scalper profits

Michael Driscoll — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 12:16:14 +0000

Summary:

582,733 consoles sold on StockX/eBay, 353,205 PS5s and 229,529 Xboxes which, by VGChartz numbers, would be 3.37% and 3.6% of all PS5 and Xboxes sold in North America respectively
$454 million in sales, ~$104 million in profits for scalpers and $56 million for eBay/StockX/PayPal
PS5 Disc sells for $899, PS5 Digital and Xbox Series X sell for $800, but Xbox Series S sells for $428

Console Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
PS5 Digital	$399	41,157	$803	$750	$406	$522	$34,862,850	$4,381,172	$11,523,779
PS5 Disc	$499	133,257	$899	$795	$507	$648	$127,366,170	$15,972,689	$35,322,680
PS5 Total	N/A	174,414	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$162,229,020	$20,353,861	$46,846,459
Xbox Series S	$299	42,178	$428	$369	$304	$385	$18,449,747	$2,334,809	$1,860,616
Xbox Series X	$499	106,435	$799	$735	$507	$639	$86,941,826	$10,889,902	$16,293,114
Xbox Total	N/A	148,613	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$105,391,573	$13,224,711	$18,153,730
Total	N/A	323,027	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$267,620,593	$33,578,572	$65,000,189

Console	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
PS5 Digital	71,113	$735	$698	$52,268,055	$6,272,167	$15,848,421
PS5 Disc	107,677	$789	$725	$84,957,153	$10,194,858	$17,673,295
PS5 Total	178,790	N/A	N/A	$137,225,208	$16,467,025	$33,521,716
Xbox Series S	22,144	$397	$330	$8,791,168	$1,054,940	$701,356
Xbox Series X	58,772	$692	$733	$40,670,224	$4,880,427	$4,629,617
Xbox Total	80,916	N/A	N/A	$49,461,392	$5,935,367	$5,330,973
Total	259,706	N/A	N/A	$186,686,600	$22,402,392	$38,852,689

The Zen 3 eBay/StockX Market - Now Just A Normal Market

Michael Driscoll — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 13:52:23 +0000

Source Code for Data Scraping: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

It has been over six months since my last series of articles and it's time for an update on the eBay/StockX market for Zen 3, Big Navi, Ampere, and the PS5/Xbox. I'll be posting an article each day with how the markets have changed.

CPUs: Zen 3
Consoles: Xbox Series S/X & PS5
GPUs: RTX 30 Series & Big Navi
- Will be next week to allow for additional analysis

Highlights:

30,254 Zen 3 CPUs sold on eBay and StockX
$18.29 million in sales on eBay/StockX, with $410k in profits for sellers and $1.74 million in profits for eBay/StockX/PayPal
Prices are now at or below MSRP

The Zen 3 market on eBay and StockX is now almost boring, which is a wonderful thing. Gone are the days of last year where it was impossible to get a Zen 3 CPU for 1.4-2.4x its retail price. Now you can buy one at MSRP easily, and a used one for less than MSRP. At time of writing, the 5800X sells for $366, 82% of its MSRP, and even the 5950X is selling for 98% of it's MSRP at $780. Further if I go to Newegg, one can easily buy any of the CPUs on sale even. The exception to this are the new Zen 3 APUs, the 5300G, 5600G, and 5700G, but even they are only going for 3-15% over MSRP and I expect will drop to normal as soon as they are easily sold.

The story of the price drops on eBay is primarily the story of Antonline's pricing. On March 17, Antonline sold over 1000 5600X's in less than two weeks at $321, and has steadily been dropping prices every few weeks, in late May to $297 selling another 500, and more recently in July to $270, less than MSRP, presumably to clear stock. A similar story plays out for the 5900X, most dramatically on May 6 where Antonline made it available for $585 and sold over 600 CPUs, and they also made the 5950X available for $879 and sold over 700 CPUs in a week. Antonline sets a maximum on eBay for pricing and by now it's unprofitable to scalp Zen 3 CPUs

CPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated Scalper Profits	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits
5300G	$150	7	$304	No Sales	$153	$188	$2,168	$740	$281
5600G	$259	72	$379	$300	$263	$321	$26,571	$3,974	$2,427
5700G	$359	71	$515	$370	$365	$448	$37,083	$4,876	$4,415
5600X	$299	9,386	$1,034	$265	$304	$375	$3,280,583	-$178,286	$295,115
5800X	$449	7,000	$730	$366	$457	$558	$3,229,732	-$474,869	$299,452
5900X	$549	6,533	$323	$530	$558	$681	$4,824,243	$487,347	$451,065
5950X	$799	4,942	$422	$780	$812	$987	$5,093,480	$364,251	$475,499
Total	N/A	28,011	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$16,493,861	$208,033	$1,528,254

StockX's market trends largely mirror eBay's, just vastly smaller, only 8% the quantity sold and 10% in revenue, and slightly cheaper, ~3% cheaper in the past week except the 5600X which is 8% cheaper. By this point it is also unprofitable to scalp on StockX, unless one is trying to resell an old CPU to upgrade.

CPU	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
5600X	98	$307	$245	$30,086	$3,610	-$2,826
5800X	115	$393	$354	$45,195	$5,423	-$11,863
5900X	1291	$750	$539	$968,250	$116,190	$143,301
5950X	739	$1,022	$759	$755,258	$90,631	$74,166
Total	2,243	N/A	N/A	$1,798,789	$215,855	$202,777

Plotting the Sales dollars over time, it is clear to see whenever there was a massive drop of stock on eBay as the total sales spikes high, also whenever the 5800X drops below some threshold (e.g. $500, $450, $500, etc...) that triggers a number of buyers. The real standout is the 5950X where Antonline saw $300,000 in revenue in a single day from making several hundred 5950X's for sale at once.

Taking a look again at who is selling the CPUs on eBay, by now it is clearly a few dominant players, mostly Antonline and Best Buy, who own the market, with 52% of CPUs sold by sellers who have sold over 50 CPUs. 31% of CPUs are still sold by sellers with <5 sales, but as the market normalizes, it'll be mostly the big retailers.

I have mostly filtered out the suspicious sellers now entirely, so very few have almost no feedback, but as before the plot is dominated by the two stores at the far end, though some other stores with less feedback even out the curve some.

I have opted not to get pricing on various other CPUs as I did last time primarily due to the increase in manual labor to scrape eBay now.

An analysis of the UK £54 million PS5/Xbox and computer hardware Scalping Market

Michael Driscoll — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 14:38:59 +0000

Source Code for Data Scraping: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

Inspired by an article in Video Game Chronicle article about UK politicians call for action against PS5 and Xbox Series scalpers, I scraped UK eBay data to get an idea of how bad it is across the pond. As I am not a UK resident, if something seems off based on the UK market please let me know and I will correct it.

Summary:

UK Console scalping market is 18% the size of the US console scalping market
Consoles have sold £42 million for £10.5 million in profits for scalpers across 52,000 consoles (76/24 PS5/Xbox in Pounds, 54/46 PS5/Xbox in number sold)
RTX 30 Series UK scalping market is 20% the size of the US one, while Big Navi's is 15% the size
10,625 GPUs have sold for £11.2 million in sales and £2.95 million ins profits for scalpers (95% of sales are RTX 30 series)
Zen 3's scalping market is only 10% the size of the US market
Zen 3 has sold 1107 CPUs for £585,000 in sales and £30,000 in profits for scalpers

Methodology:
As this gets asked a fair amount on how I avoid fake listings:

This analysis is only for sold listings.
I scanned the listings for the words png, "p n g", print, image, charity, picture, mpeg, paper, "Box only", "read description", which are indicators they're fake.
Anything below MSRP I tossed out.
Anything for a suspicious account, less than 10 feedback I manually checked.
I looked at all the lowest 100 or so listings each few days to validate.
I've been doing this every few days since December. Did I get every single listing? Surely not, but I'm very confident I got the vast majority.
For UK rates I readjusted the eBay store fees and removed the taxes for the scalper profit calculations

PS5

Nearly 35,000 PS5s were resold on eBay and StockX since the launch, going for more than 50% of their MSRP. Similar to the US market, The PS5 Digital is marked up higher relative to its MSRP than the PS5 disc indicating that people just want the console no matter which version. However while the US markets soared up to 260% MSRP, UK "only" reached 200% MSRP. More recently prices have been dropping in recent weeks, perhaps as the holidays have passed demand is dropping.

Console Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
PS5 Digital	£360	6,935	£650	£580	£366	£434	£4,619,621	£585,279	£1,399,110
PS5 Disc	£450	24,251	£750	£669	£458	£539	£19,382,894	£2,438,313	£5,499,321
Total	N/A	31,186	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	£24,002,514	£3,023,592	£6,898,431

StockX

Console	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
PS5 Digital	1,423	$845	$768	$1,202,435	$108,219	$560,591
PS5 Disc	1,914	$941	$877	$1,801,074	$162,096	$748,968
Total	3,337	N/A	N/A	$3,003,509	$270,315	$1,309,559

Note: StockX tracks sales in USD and I did not convert the above table to reflect this

Xbox Series S/X
The Xbox market again mirrors the US market, from the spike around early December to the Series S increasing in price recently, and of course fewer sales than PS5, around 29,000. The inflated cost never reached the same levels as the PS5, but it's still going for 20-30% over MSRP today.

Console Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
Xbox Series S	£250	7,983	£319	£323	£254	£297	£2,655,530	£328,685	£251,264
Xbox Series X	£450	19,417	£624	£579	£458	£537	£12,631,023	£1,549,115	£1,955,918
Total	N/A	27,400	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	£15,286,553	£1,877,800	£2,207,182

Console	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
Xbox Series S	553	$410	$464	$226,730	$20,405	$59780
Xbox Series X	876	$801	$766	$701,676	$63,150	$231,186
Total	1,429	N/A	N/A	$928,406	$83,555	$290,966

Note: StockX tracks sales in USD and I did not convert the above table to reflect this

RTX 30 Series
The RTX 30 Series have seen a recent surge in pricing across the board. I suspect this is due to American tariffs, and scalpers adjusting either because they are importing from the US, or just because they can get away with it. The 3080 is going for almost 3x its MSRP with the 3060 and 3070 over 175% MSRP. The 3090 again is the "least" overpriced at 150% MSRP, but had been closer to 120% for a while. I imagine that until American prices go down, UK prices won't either. eBay has seen just under 10,000 GPUs sold since the launches, or 25% the volume of the USA.

GPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
RTX 3060 Ti	£399	1,658	£604	£863	£406	£469	£1,101,933	£133,579	£288,573
RTX 3070	£469	4,121	£700	£886	£477	£549	£2,995,859	£384,079	£637,821
RTX 3080	£649	2,849	£1,155	£1,794	£660	£760	£4,038,997	£459,028	£1,688,233
RTX 3090	£1,399	1,367	£1,742	£2,250	£1,422	£1,621	£2,487,569	£313,896	£240,735
Total	N/A	9,995	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	£10,624,358	£1,290,582	£2,855,362

Big Navi/RDNA2
Big Navi is seeing a similar increase in pricing, but not as extreme as the RTX 30 cards, in the 150-170% MSRP range. These increases were only in the past month, could be due to tariffs or people just getting fed up. But only 630 GPUs have sold since launch on eBay, 20% what were sold in the US, and compared to the RTX 30 series a mere fracion.

GPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
RX 6800	£579	269	£749	£925	£589	£677	£207,179	£26,616	£21,610
RX 6800 XT	£649	249	£1,025	£1,099	£660	£760	£260,210	£33,265	£61,609
RX 6900	£950	112	£1,288	£1,439	£966	£1,121	£142,410	£17,746	£14,903
Total	N/A	630	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	£609,798	£77,627	£98,122

Zen 3

The real takeaway for Zen 3 in the UK is just the scarcity of parts compared to the US. 10% the number of Zen 3 CPUs have sold on eBay. It appears that AMD is just unable to get CPUs over to the UK as it's having trouble enough supplying the US. The recent increase in pricing of the 5950X and 5900X are clear evidence of this, there are few listings and very few sales as some people just give up and buy the CPU despite the price gouging. Curiously overall the 5800X seems to be a small loss for scalpers, clearly many are just trying to cut losses now and sell the stock they have.

CPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
5600X	£280	460	£324	£315	£285	£328	£154,829	£18,690	£4,654
5800X	£420	246	£439	£410	£427	£488	£113,051	£12,325	-£3,965
5900X	£510	239	£670	£782	£518	£596	£164,342	£20,770	£19,303
5950X	£750	162	£920	£950	£762	£871	£152,496	£18,574	£10,802
Total	N/A	1,107	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	£584,717	£70,359	£30,794

An analysis of the $143 million PS5 Scalping Market

Michael Driscoll — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 23:22:59 +0000

Source Code for Data Scraping: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

This article is a continuation of my analysis of the scalping market.

Summary:

7.06% of all PS5s sold in US resold on eBay/StockX (through 1/16), an additional estimated 3-8% on OfferUp/FB/CL for 10-15% of all PS5s resold
157,004 PS5s sold on eBay/StockX
$143 million in sales on eBay/StockX for $43.2 million in profit for scalpers and $15.9 million for eBay/PayPal/StockX
The PS5 Digital is going for 200% ($799) of its MSRP and the PS5 Disc for 170% of its ($849) MSRP
PS4 pricing increased 50% after the PS5 launch and sales tripled for the initial weeks after PS5 launch

Methodology:
As this gets asked a fair amount on how I avoid fake listings:

This analysis is only for sold listings.
I scanned the listings for the words png, "p n g", print, image, picture, mpeg, paper, "Box only", "read description", which are indicators they're fake.
Anything below MSRP I tossed out.
Anything for a suspicious account, less than 10 feedback I manually checked.
I looked at all the lowest 100 or so listings each few days to validate.
I've been doing this every few days since December. Did I get every single listing? Surely not, but I'm very confident I got the vast majority.

The headline is that 7.06% of all PS5s sold since launch have been resold on eBay or StockX, as according to VGChartz 2.067 million PS5es have been sold in the US through 1/16, while on eBay/StockX 145,967 had been sold in the same time frame.

But clearly eBay and StockX are not the only places people are selling and buying PS5s. Searching OfferUp and scanning the active listings for most of the largest metropolitan regions of the USA ,filtering on >$400 and pickup only.

City	PS5 Listings	City	PS5 Listings
Los Angeles	8,487	Boston	1,058
New York City	5,476	Detroit	1,029
San Francisco	2,293	Phoenix	948
Miami	2,265	Las Vegas	769
Houston	1,846	Seattle	540
Dallas	1,810	Portland	513
Chicago	1,809	St. Louis	227
Washington, D.C.	1732	Minneapolis	204
Atlanta	1,356	Denver	197

	Total	32,559

This is to be compared to eBay's current 5881 active listings (StockX has 280), which would suggest that OfferUp's market size is up to 5.5x the size of eBay's.

However, these numbers are larger than the reality, due to fake listings, stale listings, and other items getting caught up in the search, but that is also offset by some listings being for multiple PS5s and I only looked at 18 city metros. From my examination of some of the data I would think that is no more than 20%, but to be conservative let's call it 50% of all the listings. Further if we assume items sell at half the rate of eBay, it would increase the total resold to 11%, though more realistically it would be closer to 15%, with another 2% of the total PS5's sold just sitting trying to be resold on eBay/OfferUp/StockX/etc...

Returning to eBay's sold listings, prices dropped ~$300 by Christmas from the post-launch peak, and unlike the Xboxes prices have remained fairly stable since the start of the New Year at $799 for the PS5 Digital, and $849 for the PS5 Disc. Sales have dropped down to ~350/day for the disc version and ~100/day for the Digital.

PS5 Median Pricing in Raw Dollars

Console Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
PS5 Digital	$399	18,329	$894	$799	$522	$406	$16,622,295	$2,114,599	$6,104,994
PS5 Disc	$499	61,586	$987	$849	$649	$507	$63,354,245	$8,064,429	$20,205,041
Total	N/A	79,915	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$79,976,540	$10,179,028	$26,310,035

StockX is nearly as large a seller of PS5es as eBay, selling only 4% fewer PS5s, though 21% less total sales dollars, and 36% less profit for the scalpers. Perhaps due to StockX's ask/bid system, forcing every seller to sell at the lowest current price, it pulls prices to be lower as buyers don't have to scan hundreds of listings and compete against each other as much.

Console	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
PS5 Digital	27,695	$788	$405	$21,823,660	$1,964,129	$7,048,447
PS5 Disc	49,394	$845	$725	$41,737,930	$3,756,414	$9,800,387
Total	77,089	N/A	N/A	$63,561,590	$5,720,543	$16,848,834

PS5 Digital Cumulative Plot

For the cumulative sales/profits, profits have not leveled off nearly as much as for the Xbox, with there still being a noticeable positive slope to the profit trendline, though it has dropped significantly as the market prices have been brought down.

Below are the weekly eBay and StockX sales compared to the VGChartz sales of that week. I did have to estimate the StockX # sold each week, using the eBay number as a proxy and using the ratio, which the totals are below. These numbers combine the PS5 Digital and Disc. Most notable is that week after week, the % of PS5s resold of the total number sold increases, one must assume people figure they can wait to play games and make a small profit now.

Week	Weekly US Sold	Cumulative Sold	Weekly eBay Sold	Cumulative eBay Sold	% sold on eBay of US Cumulative	Assumed StockX totals	Estimated StockX %	Est Total %
14-Nov	1004523	1004523	15142	15142	1.51%	14607	1.45%	2.96%
21-Nov	64734	1069257	7669	22811	2.13%	22004	2.06%	4.19%
28-Nov	74853	1144110	7633	30444	2.66%	29367	2.57%	5.23%
5-Dec	156853	1300963	7341	37785	2.90%	36449	2.80%	5.71%
12-Dec	178621	1479584	8166	45951	3.11%	44326	3.00%	6.10%
19-Dec	187792	1667376	8746	54697	3.28%	52763	3.16%	6.44%
26-Dec	166937	1834313	6003	60700	3.31%	58553	3.19%	6.50%
2-Jan	106048	1940361	5026	65726	3.39%	63402	3.27%	6.65%
9-Jan	69273	2009634	4927	70653	3.52%	68155	3.39%	6.91%
16-Jan	57882	2067516	3644	74297	3.59%	71670	3.47%	7.06%

Compared to the Computer hardware, there’s a much higher percentage of the sales being by eBay Stores, whether these are real stores (e.g. Newegg) or scalper eBay stores reselling for a huge market, either way they are profiting. Fully 40% of PS5 sales are from sellers selling just one or two consoles, again those who were opportunistic and able to get their hands on one to resell. For true scalpers, it’s at least 35% of the market of those selling 5+ consoles.

Similar to the Xbox One S/X, the launch of the PS5 has driven up PS4 and PS4 Pro pricing. Likely many are reselling their consoles with games for a bundle deal, and the sales volume doubling for a while before coming back to prelaunch sales volume.

An analysis of the $80 million Xbox Series S/X Scalping Market

Michael Driscoll — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:59:28 +0000

Source Code for Data Scraping: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

This article is a continuation of my analysis of the scalping market.

Summary:

6.85% of all Xboxes sold in US resold on eBay/StockX (through 1/16)
113,220 Xboxes sold on eBay/StockX
$79.68 million in sales on eBay/StockX for $14.57 million in profit for scalpers and $10.4 million for eBay/PayPal/StockX
Prices now about 150% MSRP for both consoles and sales/day down to 100/300 a day from the Series S and X respectively on eBay
Xbox One S resale prices have increased ~33% and One X prices have remained relatively stable

Methodology:
As this gets asked a fair amount on how I avoid fake listings:

This analysis is only for sold listings.
I scanned the listings for the words image, picture, mpeg, paper, "Box only", "read description", which are indicators they're fake.
Anything below MSRP I tossed out.
Anything for a suspicious account, less than 10 feedback I manually checked.
I looked at all the lowest 100 or so listings each few days to validate.
I've been doing this every few days since December. Did I get every single listing? Surely not, but I'm very confident I got the vast majority.

The headline is that 6.85% of all Xboxes sold since launch have been resold on eBay or StockX, as according to VGChartz 1.562 million Xboxes have been sold in the US through 1/16, while on eBay/StockX 109,948 had been sold in the same time frame. And, guessing here, once we include FB Marketplace, Craigslist, various Discords, subreddits, Twitter DMs, etc... the number has to be well north of 10%, I would guess 15-20%, but I can only point to data on that first 6.84%.

Prices significantly dropped just before Christmas, I assume people were overspending to get a console to give as a present, but the pricing has slowly been increasing lately. However, the pricing doesn’t tell the whole story, when looking at the number of sales per day there has been a dramatic drop off, the Series S is now about 100/day from an average of 300/day before and the Series X down to about 200/day from averaging closer to 800/day. I believe those who wanted the consoles got them, and now those whose patience is finally running out.

Xbox Median Pricing in Raw Dollars

Console Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
Xbox Series S	$299	18,339	$460	$438	$385	$304	$8,572,490	$2,379,638	$1,292,467
Xbox Series X	$499	50,990	$836	$750	$639	$507	$43,253,936	$5,518,138	$9,171,837
Total	N/A	69,329	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$51,826,425	$7,897,776	$10,464,304

StockX is nearly as large a seller of Xboxes as eBay, with 63% the number sales as eBay, over $27 million in sales dollars.

Console	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
Xbox Series S	12,635	$416	$405	$5,256,160	$473,054	$579,599
Xbox Series X	31,256	$723	$630	$22,598,088	$2,033,828	$3,523,880
Total	43,891	N/A	N/A	$27,854,248	$2,506,882	$4,103,479

Xbox Series S Cumulative Plot

For the cumulative sales/profits, profits have nearly leveled off for scalpers, still plenty for them but they are no longer profiting quite so much, though this is more due to sales volume decreasing than pricing going down.

Below are the weekly eBay and StockX sales compared to the VGChartz sales of that week. I did have to estimate the StockX # sold each week, using the eBay number as a proxy and using the ratio, which the totals are below. These numbers combine the Xbox Series S and X. The most interesting trend is that more people are turning to resell their consoles each week compared to the total sold commercially.

Week	Weekly US Sold	Cumulative Total Sold in US	Weekly eBay Sold	Cumulative eBay Sold	% sold on eBay of US Cumulative	Estimated Weekly StockX totals	Estimated Weekly StockX %	Est Total %
14-Nov	715262	715262	14934	14934	2.09%	9450	1.32%	3.41%
21-Nov	56264	771526	6612	21546	2.79%	13634	1.77%	4.56%
28-Nov	64734	836260	6522	28068	3.36%	17761	2.12%	5.48%
5-Dec	119381	955641	8358	36426	3.81%	23050	2.41%	6.22%
12-Dec	139849	1095490	8674	45100	4.12%	28539	2.61%	6.72%
19-Dec	167536	1263026	8192	53292	4.22%	33723	2.67%	6.89%
26-Dec	142812	1405838	5226	58518	4.16%	37030	2.63%	6.80%
2-Jan	99837	1505675	3506	62024	4.12%	39248	2.61%	6.73%
9-Jan	56804	1562479	2838	64862	4.15%	41044	2.63%	6.78%
16-Jan	45443	1607922	2604	67466	4.20%	42692	2.66%	6.85%

Much the same as the computer hardware, the most common seller feedback is in the 100-499 range, and about 9% of the listings are likely scams with sellers having <10 feedback.

At least 28% or even up to 45% of all the Xbox sales are 1-2 sellers. Now this could just be the case that scalpers are making secondary accounts to throw off the scent, but that would not line up with the sales feedback distribution. I believe a number of people just got a console and figured it was in their best interest to sell it rather than use it.

Looking at the Xbox One S/X, there was a drop and then spike in sales after the Series S/X shortly after launched, which I am not too surprised as people were selling their old consoles when they got a new one, especially given the backwards compatibility, but the increase in price is surprising. It could be contributed to more “bundles” as people are selling their consoles with much of their games perhaps.

An analysis of the $4 million Big Navi/RDNA2 Scalping Market

Michael Driscoll — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 02:28:52 +0000

Source Code for Data Scraping: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

This article is a continuation of my analysis of the scalping market.

Highlights:

3,461 RDNA2 GPUs sold on eBay/StockX
$3.95 million in sales on eBay/StockX for ~$944k in profit for scalpers and $615k for eBay/PayPal/StockX
6800 XT price increased 17% since 1/1 while 6900 and 6800 only increased 7%
RX 5000 and Vega cards have increased 33% or more since 1/1

Methodology:
As this gets asked a fair amount on how I avoid fake listings:

This analysis is only for sold listings.
I scanned the listings for the words image, picture, mpeg, paper, "Box only", "read description", which are indicators they're fake.
Anything below MSRP I tossed out.
Anything for a suspicious account, less than 10 feedback I manually checked.
I looked at all the lowest 100 or so listing to validate. * I've been doing this every few days for the past few months. Did I get every single listing? Surely not, but I'm very confident I got the vast majority.

For better or worse, Big Navi must be compared in relation to the RTX 30 series. This is quite evident just in the sales volume, just 7% of the RTX 30 series. Further while prices have been increasing for Big Navi since the new year, it is not nearly as dramatic as the RTX 30 series, a clear indication of just lower demand. Not to say there is no demand, on 1/10/21 Newegg dropped 157 RX 6900s and they sold out within an hour, causing a significant drop in the median price for the day. But we can see a clear trend of the 6800 XT going from a low around 170% MSRP to currently just above 200%, while the base 6800 and 6900 share nearly identical overpricing percentages.

For the prices below, I have left the break evens as they were from before the tariff increase to show how much prices have changed and the scalper profits using the old MSRP as I suspect most sales are from cards purchased before the increase.

Median Pricing in Dollars

GPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated Scalper Profits	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits
RX 6800	$399	1169	$865	$909	$720	$589	$1,035,858	$185,978	$300,746
RX 6800 XT	$499	1135	$1,229	$1,320	$807	$660	$1,394,076	$440,234	$151,922
RX 6900 XT	$699	722	$1,460	$1,549	$1,234	$1,015	$1,072,000	$172,569	$122,496
Total	N/A	3026	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$3,501,934	$798,781	$575,164

Comparing eBay to StockX for Big Navi, scalpers are far less likely to use StockX. StockX sold 14% as many Big Navi GPUs vs 27% as many Ampere GPUs. The total volume of sales is below half a million, though the profits are nothing to scoff at.

CPU	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
RX 6800	128	$830	$898	$105,810	$9,523	$36,929
RX 6800 XT	239	$1,036	$1,249	$248,346	$22,351	$88,245
RX 6900 XT	68	$1,377	$1,453	$94,716	$8,524	$31,827
Total	435	N/A	N/A	$448,872	$40,398	$157,001

The cumulative sales charts mostly show a fairly linear profitability curve for the scalpers, not a very steep slope, but still a hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of interest are the clear examples when Newegg lists 100+ units for sale and they sell out within the day, spiking the sales/profits trendline.

For the sellers, there’s a clear 3-16% fakes, of those with <10 feedback on eBay, and again the largest group being 100-499. However the ratio of stores selling vs non-stores is lower, perhaps scalpers are being more successful? But of all the listings Big Navi has the most sellers who are selling 1-2, 51% of them. Whether this is an indication of scalpers not caring as much or just the lack of listings is something I am unable to determine.

Big Navi/RDNA2 Series AIB Daily compare

AIB	AIB Total # Sold	AIB Total Sales	6800 Average Price	6800 Total Sold	6800 Total Sales	6800 XT Average Price	6800 XT Total Sold	6800 XT Total Sales	6900 XT Average Price	6900 XT Total Sold	6900 XT Total Sales
SAPPHIRE	769	$899,652	$895	305	$272,902	$1,277	316	$403,485	$1,509	148	$223,265
XFX	398	$461,609	$924	153	$141,318	$1,226	162	$198,685	$1,465	83	$121,606
ASROCK	342	$407,307	$853	103	$87,900	$1,169	69	$80,695	$1,404	170	$238,712
POWERCOLOR	250	$320,803	$876	66	$57,829	$1,293	71	$91,819	$1,515	113	$171,155
GIGABYTE	245	$246,181	$868	153	$132,741	$1,181	71	$83,850	$1,409	21	$29,590
ASUS	215	$265,015	$911	69	$62,840	$1,298	109	$141,493	$1,640	37	$60,683
MSI	120	$128,591	$851	67	$56,994	$1,194	21	$25,081	$1,454	32	$46,516

Reviewing the AIB resellers, its clear Sapphire is generally preferred, or at least is likely getting the most supply which is being resold immediately, twice as many cards as any other supplier. ASRock seems to sell the cheapest cards, always near the bottom in average price while ASUS is the most again.

Coming again to the question of last generation, perhaps not directly because of the limited supply, but the resale price of the RX 5700 XT, the RX 5700, RX 5600, RX 5600XT have all dramatically increased in price for most doubling what they were in October of November. This seems less due to the scarcity of cards and more the tariffs.

Detailed Sales Plots

Big Navi	RX 5000 & Vega	RX 500	RX 400	R7/R9 300
RX 6900 XT	Radeon VII	RX 590	RX 480	R7 350
RX 6800 XT	RX Vega 64	RX 580	RX 470	R7 360
RX 6800	RX Vega 56	RX 570	RX 460	R9 380
RX 5700 XT		RX 560		R9 380X
RX 5700		RX 550X		R9 390
RX 5600 XT		RX 550		R9 Fury
RX 5500 XT		R9 Nano		R9 Fury X
		Radeon Pro Duo

Cumulative Sales Plots

Big Navi	RX 5000 & Vega	RX 500	RX 400	R7/R9 300
RX 6900 XT	Radeon VII	RX 590	RX 480	R7 350
RX 6800 XT	RX Vega 64	RX 580	RX 470	R7 360
RX 6800	RX Vega 56	RX 570	RX 460	R9 380
RX 5700 XT		RX 560		R9 380X
RX 5700		RX 550X		R9 390
RX 5600 XT		RX 550		R9 Fury
RX 5500 XT		R9 Nano		R9 Fury X
		Radeon Pro Duo

An analysis of the $62 million RTX 30 Series Scalping Market

Michael Driscoll — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 02:47:09 +0000

Source Code for Data Scraping: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

This article is a continuation of my analysis of the scalping market.

Zen 3
Ampere/RTX 30 Series
Big Navi
Xbox Series S/X
PS5

Highlights:

49,580 Ampere GPUs sold on eBay/StockX
$61.5 million in sales on eBay/StockX for ~$15.2 million in profit for scalpers and $6.8 million for eBay/PayPal/StockX
Sale prices increased 6-25% due to the tariffs, except for the 3090 which its scalped price was unaffected
RTX 20, RTX 16, GTX 1000, and GTX 900 series cards all increased 33-100% in price since the launch of Ampere

Methodology:
As this gets asked a fair amount on how I avoid fake listings:

This analysis is only for sold listings.
I scanned the listings for the words image, picture, mpeg, paper, "Box only", "read description", which are indicators they're fake.
Anything below MSRP I tossed out.
Anything for a suspicious account, less than 10 feedback I manually checked.
I looked at all the lowest 100 or so listing to validate. * I've been doing this every few days for the past few months. Did I get every single listing? Surely not, but I'm very confident I got the vast majority.

Checking in on the RTX 30 series and Big Navi, the only thing I can say about my previous commentary is that I was wrong. I had predicted the launch of the 3060 Ti would bring pricing down, and that was very wrong. This is in no small part due to the new tariffs on graphics cards which hiked prices by 7-25%, and scalpers… hiked their prices just as much. The 3060 went from 160% launch price 1/1/21 to now 210% launch price and has recently fallen down to 190% of launch price. The 3080 is a similar story, from 170% at Christmas to now 200%. The 3070 has grown more modestly to “only” 170%, though the 3090 seems unaffected. I suspect its price is already so high that those who felt a need to buy it have already bought and now only those who want to buy are buying and can wait for semi-normal price.

RTX 30 Series Median Pricing in Raw Dollars

GPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated Scalper Profits	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits
RTX 3060 Ti	$399	5539	$667	$800	$498	$406	$3,839,423	$974,121	$434,582
RTX 3070	$499	11684	$809	$867	$623	$507	$9,532,680	$2,092,119	$1,077,600
RTX 3080	$699	14066	$1300	$1449	$869	$711	$19,246,356	$6,313,471	$2,233,617
RTX 3090	$1499	7775	$2159	$2109	$1849	$1523	$17,426,583	$2,914,143	$1,973,795
Total	N/A	39064	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$50,045,042	$12,293,854	$5,719,594

Comparing eBay to StockX for Ampere, while the volume on StockX is smaller, it is not insignificant. Over $11.5 million in sales, $2.8 million in scalper profits, over 10,000 sold across the three cards, scalpers are reaping in the profits all over.

CPU	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
3060 Ti	1955	$637	$735	$1,256,499	$113,085	$325,674
3070	3697	$794	$812	$2,885,006	$259,650	$694,002
3080	3473	$1,302	$1,318	$4,408,229	$396,740	$1,451,614
3090	1491	$2,008	$1,921	$2,987,600	$268,884	$394,079
Total	10616	N/A	N/A	$11,537,334	$1,038,360	$2,865,370

Looking into the cumulative sales and profits over time, in the case of all four RTX 30 series, there was a sudden surge in sales between Christmas and shortly after the new year. 3090s seem to have surged before the new year, Christmas sales I imagine, but the other three cards had a run on sales once the tariffs were announced, briefly doubling or even tripling the normal sales volume for any given day.

When it comes to the sellers of the RTX 30 series, there are far more no-store sellers vs store sellers compared to Zen 3, despite a ~5x difference in sales volume between the two. Further for those sellers selling 5 or more GPUs, it only makes up a quarter of the sellers, while 61% sold 5 or fewer, with 22% selling just one and just over a third selling 1 or 2. It seems many more individuals were lucky to get their hands on an RTX 30 series and turned to eBay to make a quick buck than Zen 3.

In terms of feedback, at least 4% of listing are scams with zero feedback, but the curve followers a normal curve as to be expected, with the 100-499 range being the most common with 31% of sellers.

RTX 30 Series AIB Daily compare

AIB	AIB Total # Sold	AIB Total Sales	3060 Average Price	3060 Total Sold	3060 Total Sales	3070 Average Price	3070 Total Sold	3070 Total Sales	3080 Average Price	3080 Total Sold	3080 Total Sales	3090 Average Price	3090 Total Sold	3090 Total Sales
FOUNDER	9800	$13,406,829	$682	1426	$972,931	$824	3046	$2,508,472	$1,442	2413	$3,479,836	$2,211	2915	$6,445,590
EVGA	6867	$8,791,818	$704	497	$349,838	$813	1536	$1,248,461	$1,287	3805	$4,897,758	$2,231	1029	$2,295,761
ASUS	5746	$7,793,521	$724	766	$554,722	$843	1823	$1,536,588	$1,399	1870	$2,616,654	$2,397	1287	$3,085,557
MSI	5826	$6,509,853	$689	812	$559,452	$813	2131	$1,733,270	$1,264	2197	$2,777,162	$2,099	686	$1,439,969
GIGABYTE	4780	$5,289,832	$692	1045	$723,600	$812	1616	$1,312,354	$1,322	1575	$2,082,402	$2,153	544	$1,171,477
ZOTAC	3205	$3,612,846	$671	486	$325,941	$766	886	$678,313	$1,200	1290	$1,548,581	$1,952	543	$1,060,012
PNY	917	$1,153,876	$745	24	$17,879	$772	347	$267,881	$1,276	322	$410,936	$2,041	224	$457,180

A natural question when it comes to the RTX 30 series is does AIB reseller have any impact on the price someone is willing to buy from a scalper? In terms of sheer sales volume, the Founder series has 9800 sales, with EVGA coming second with 6867 , then MSI with 5826. Despite that it appears ASUS is consistently priced higher than others, often by 20% for periods, while ZOTAC and PNY are the lowest priced by on average closer to 15%. This could just be an indication that ZOTAC and PNY don’t sell as many high-end cards or a lack of trust in the brand.

Finally, what impact did the release of the RTX 30 series have on previous generations of NVIDIA graphics cards? For Pascal cards, initially they stayed stable, but the new tariffs have increased the resale prices of all GTX 10 series cards, by about 50% for most of the cards. Turing’s RTX 20 series is also affected though again to a lesser extent, mostly impacting the lower end cards, the 2060s and 2060 Supers. However, the real rise in pricing was for the Turing RTX 16 series cards, all of them going up 50-60% in price since the launch of Ampere. It doesn't stop with those either, even the GTX 900 series have seen price nearly double for a few cards, though still well below their initial MSRP.

Detailed Sales Plots

RTX 200 Series	RTX 16 Series	GTX 10 Series	GTX 900 Series	GTX 700 Series	GTX 600 Series	GTX 500 Series
2080 Ti	1660 Ti	Titan XP	Titan X	Titan Z	690	590
2080 Super	1660 Super	1080 Ti	980 Ti	Titan Black	680	580
2080	1660	1080	980	780 Ti	670	570
2070 Super	1650 Super	1070 Ti	970	780	660 Ti	560
2070	1650	1070	960	770	660	550 Ti
2060 Super		1060	950	760	650 Ti	545
2060				750 Ti	650	530
				750	640	520
				740	630
				730	610
				720	605
				710

Cumulative Profit/Sales Plots

RTX 200 Series	RTX 16 Series	GTX 10 Series	GTX 900 Series	GTX 700 Series	GTX 600 Series	GTX 500 Series
2080 Ti	1660 Ti	Titan XP	Titan X	Titan Z	690	590
2080 Super	1660 Super	1080 Ti	980 Ti	Titan Black	680	580
2080	1660	1080	980	780 Ti	670	570
2070 Super	1650 Super	1070 Ti	970	780	660 Ti	560
2070	1650	1070	960	770	660	550 Ti
2060 Super		1060	950	760	650 Ti	545
2060				750 Ti	650	530
				750	640	520
				740	630
				730	610
				720	605
				710

An analysis of the $6 million Zen 3 Scalping Market

Michael Driscoll — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 22:39:36 +0000

Source Code for Data Scraping: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

Firstly, I must say I am taken aback by the reception my first article got. I was not expecting it to get nearly so much publicity and I want to thank everyone who shared it. It went everywhere from PC World and PC Magazine to Bloomberg

rg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/playstation-5-scalpers-use-bots-to-hunt-down-scarce-consoles) and internationally, even being discussed as UK politicians seek to implement bans on scalping bots.

Over the week I will provide an update up on how pricing has changed in the past month since my first article, especially with the recent tariff increases on graphics cards, starting with Zen 3.

Highlights:

8720 Zen 3 CPUs sold on eBay
$5.88 million in sales on eBay for $946k in profit for scalpers and $625k for eBay/PayPal
Prices have stabilized over the past month at 25-40% over MSRP
The launch of Zen 3 has increased Zen 2 and Zen+ resale pricing 20-30% and decreased i9 resale pricing by 10-30%

Methodology:
As this gets asked a fair amount on how I avoid fake listings:

This analysis is only for sold listings.
I scanned the listings for the words image, picture, mpeg, paper, "Box only", "read description", which are indicators they're fake.
Anything below MSRP I tossed out.
Anything for a suspicious account, less than 10 feedback I manually checked.
I looked at all the lowest 100 or so listing to validate. * I've been doing this every few days for the past few months. Did I get every single listing? Surely not, but I'm very confident I got the vast majority.

Overall Zen 3 pricing has stabilized well above the profitability cutoff for scalpers. My initial thoughts of the 5800X pricing continuing to fall did not pan out, rather scalpers just found their pricing floor early. The 5800X is 25% above MSRP, the 5950X and 5900X are 40% over MSRP, and the 5600X is 30% over MSRP with a slight downward trend.

Zen 3 Median Pricing in Raw Dollars

CPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Total Sales	Estimated Scalper Profits	Estimated eBay/PayPal Profits
5600X	$299	3204	$405	$375	$375	$304	$1,303,102	$117,760	$135,431
5800X	$449	2126	$553	$538	$558	$457	$1,203,970	$39,604	$128,891
5900X	$549	1962	$800	$785	$682	$558	$1,626,043	$459,256	$180,146
5950X	$799	1437	$1187	$1110	$987	$812	$1,747,357	$329,639	$181,197
Total	N/A	8729	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	$5,880,472	$946,259	$625,665

I have also included some numbers for StockX as they too are selling CPUs, GPUs, but especially the consoles. In terms of Zen 3 it is significantly cheaper than eBay to buy on StockX. I would guess partially due to lower fees (~12% vs eBays ~13%) but largely I would guess due to obscurity and StockX sellers are having to drop their prices to get buyers.

CPU	Total Sold	Average Sales Price	Last Week Average Price	Total Sales Volume	Estimated StockX Profits	Estimated Scalper Profits
5900X	507	$758	$749	$384,306	$34,588	$42,450
5950X	298	$1098	$1030	$325,416	$29,287	$33,383
Total	805	N/A	N/A	$709,722	$63,875	$75,833

In order to dive deeper into the pricing trends over time, I have plotted out the cumulative sale and profits over time. It can be pretty clearly seen that on eBay, there’s a near linear relationship of sales vs time for most Zen CPUs. That is in terms total dollars/day, eBay sells about the same amount (on average). I expect this is a pretty natural supply vs demand curve, as prices go down, more people buy. The 5800X is again the odd man out, where its curve has started to level off somewhat, perhaps a saturation of the market, and while scalpers have made more than eBay & PayPal for the other CPUs, for the 5800X it’s eBay that’s really profiting.

Looking into who the sellers are, I graphed the quantity sold vs the number of sales, and the seller star categories, grouping all of Zen 3 together rather than by individual CPU. For Zen 3, 25% of the CPUs were the only CPU the seller sold, 39% sold one or two CPUS. I expect these are the more “opportunistic” buyers who happened to buy one at Best Buy and resold it for a quick buck. Once we look past that, 41% of sales were buy sellers who sold 5 or more CPUs, sellers who definitely knew what they were doing, could upfront the cash to buy a multiple CPUs and are the most devoted scalpers. Further the more CPUS a seller sells, the more likely they are that it’s an eBay store which clearly means they are more sophisticated in their approach.

Comparing feedback, at least 12% of sellers I think fall into the suspicious range, who have 0-9 feedback. They could be real, but clearly they are new to eBay. The most common seller has 100-499 feedback, with 38% of sellers like that, and then it levels off fast.

Thinking beyond Zen 3 pricing, I wanted to know what the impact was on the past generations of AMD CPUs, and Intel. For Zen+ and Zen 2 CPUs, at the same time as Zen 3 released, there was a general increase in their prices as well across the board. The average Zen+ CPU increased ~33% while for Zen 2 it was closer to a 25% increase. The real outliers are the 3100 and 3300X, which jumped closer to 45% of their previous price. I would suspect this is due to buyers having their whole system ready to build except for the CPU and just buying something to tide themselves over until they could get the Zen 3 CPU they desire. Original Zen CPU prices don’t seem to be as affected.

i7 Median Pricing

For Intel, it looks like the October 8th launch date annoucement, drove down pricing on the i9s before the actual launch date of November 5, perhaps as users wanted to upgrade or just weren’t willing to spend that much anymore. Prices dropped ~$50 on the i9 9900k and nearly $200 for the i9-10900k for resellers. i7s seem less affected along with older generations of Intel CPUs, presumably those who are willing to spend less or just doing an in-place upgrade are less sensitive to movement on the high end.

The full set of graphs for the various CPUs is below. Note that profit curves are not very accurate for older CPUs due to them mostly being resales, best to just ignore the profit curves for previous generations.

AMD CPU Sales Plots	AMD CPU Cumulative Plots	Intel CPU Sales Plots	AMD CPU Cumulative Plots
5950X	5950X	i9 10900k	i9 10900k
5900X	5900X	i9 9900k	i9 9900k
5800X	5800X	i7 10700k	i7 10700k
5600X	5600X	i7 9700k	i7 9700k
3950X	3950X	i7 8700k	i7 8700k
3900XT	3900XT	i7 7700k	i7 7700k
3900X	3900X	i7 6700k	i7 6700k
3800XT	3800XT	i7 4790k	i7 4790k
3800X	3800X	i7 4770k	i7 4770k
3700X	3700X	i7 3770k	i7 3770k
3600XT	3600XT	i7 2600k + 2700k	i7 2600k + 2700k
3600X	3600X	i7 Westmere	i7 Westmere
3300X	3300X	i7 Lynnfield	i7 Lynnfield
3600	3600	i7 Nehalem	i7 Nehalem
3100	3100
2700X	2700X
2700	2700
2600X	2600X
2600	2600
1800X	1800X
1700X	1700X
1700	1700
1600X	1600X
1600	1600
1600 AF	1600 AF
1500X	1500X
1400	1400
1300X	1300X
1200	1200

An analysis of the $82 million eBay Scalping Market for Xbox, PS5, AMD, and NVIDIA

Michael Driscoll — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 22:02:25 +0000

Similar to many others, I am eager to get my hands on some of the new tech that's come out, specifically the 5950X, 3080, and PS5, but scalpers seem to be ruining this for everyone. To get an idea of how bad it really is, I wrote a script to scrape all of eBay's sold listings for the products and graph them to get some trends.

Some definitions/assumptions for how I analyzed the data:

Casual Scalper Break Even: The point at which someone who just bought some of the products at retail and listed it would likely no longer be profiting. Using an eBay fees calculator I assumed this type of scalper does not have an eBay store, is not a top seller, paid a 6.25% tax, and is paying the median shipping on the listings.
Sophisticated Scalper Break Even: These types of scalpers I assume have made a business out of scalping and through various means are a top eBay seller, have a premium or better eBay store, managed to not pay taxes, and found a way to get the items at a discount. This is the worst case scalper, who has bots set up to automatically buy items when they are released on Newegg, Amazon, Best Buy, etc... and auto list keeping their costs minimal. Edit: I have gotten many comments that this is a bit too unbelievable an outcome, which it very well may be. I will consider adding tax back in, but this was always meant to be a worst possible case, not the most likely case.
Scalper/eBay Profits: Sum of all sold prices - MSRP * number of sold listings
For Big Navi and RTX 30 series, I am just going off of the base MSRP for analysis, while I realize the real MSRP can fluctuate a few hundred dollars (e.g. base 3080 is $699 but an aftermarket one from ASUS is $850 MSRP), but using the baseline is easiest and represents a floor.
For each search I filtered for "US Only" and for each item set a min price cutoff, usually around 0.5 * MSRP and up to normally ~5 * MSRP to remove some false positives. See the code for specifics

Source Code: https://github.com/driscoll42/ebayScraper

Zen 3

CPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Scalper/eBay Profits	Total Sales
5600X	$299	728	$428	$413	$375	$304	$96,454	$314,126
5800X	$449	633	$589	$545	$558	$457	$93,715	$377,932
5900X	$549	533	$873	$825	$682	$558	$190,756	$483,373
5950X	$799	322	$1395	$1275	$987	$812	$195,812	$453,090

Zen 3 is the code name for AMD's new CPU architecture, representing the first time since 2005 AMD has had faster singlethread performance than Intel. Currently there are four CPUs on the market, the 6-core 5600X, the 8-core 5800X, the 12-core 5900X, and the 16-core 5950X. At their MSRP they are all faster than any of their peers and sell out instantly.

Zen 3 has the best pricing outlook out of all the product types investigated. All of the CPUs are on a downward pricing trend, with the 5800X recently below the break-even point for casual scalpers. Likely the casual scalpers will stop buying new 5800Xs soon and try to sell off their stock. Eventually as AMD's keeps making new chips, the 5800X pricing will but a ceiling on the 5600X, a high ceiling, but a ceiling nonetheless and drive its prices down. Scalpers clearly did not anticipate demand for the 5950X and 5900X, initially pricing the chips 50% below what they could be sold for and quickly corrected in a couple days. The 5950X and 5900X are still well above 50% of their MSRP, and based on trends I would not expect them to be down to MSRP before mid-January.

Big Navi

GPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Scalper/eBay Profits	Total Sales
RX 6800	$579	263	$859	$850	$720	$589	$81,044	$233,321
RX 6800 XT	$649	191	$1277	$1247	$807	$660	$120,650	$244,609

Big Navi (RDNA 2) is AMD's new graphics card microarchitecture, with two cards out, the RX 6800 and RX 6800XT and the RX 6900 XT announced, but not releasing until December 8. Competitive with NVIDIA's new RTX 30 series graphics cards, they too sell out instantly.

Big Navi is comparatively worse than Zen 3; the 6800 XT is still going for 75% over MSRP and the base 6800 selling for 150% of MSRP since it launched. More recently the 6800 XT has seen a 10-20% drop in price which if it keeps up that trend will be more reasonably pressed by the end of the year, but I expect the trend will not hold. The 6800 shows no signs of having improved pricing, with a very flat pricing trend, potentially the release of the 3060 and sales of other RTX cards will drive its price down.

RTX 30 Series

GPU Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Scalper/eBay Profits	Total Sales
RTX 3060 Ti	$399	112	$649	$649	$498	$406	$22,948	$67,636
RTX 3070	$499	4141	$786	$809	$623	$507	$1,254,754	$3,321,113
RTX 3080	$699	7222	$1315	$1250	$869	$711	$5,278,707	$10,326,885
RTX 3090	$1499	3749	$2250	$2017	$1849	$1523	$3,049,667	$8,669,418

The RTX 30 series is NVIDIAs line up of new graphics cards, the 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, and 3090. At their MSRPs they are the best graphic cards on the market enabling gaming at 4K resolution at 60 FPS at the high end.

For as poor as Big Navi's pricing is, the RTX 30 series pricing is even worse. The 3060 launched on 12/1 and immediately started selling for >50% of its MSRP. Since 11/15 all four cards have seen their pricing trends progress upwards after decreasing since launch. It is possible anticipation of Black Friday/Cyber Monday drove down prices temporarily. Ironically the 3060 is 60% over MSRP, 3070 is 70% over MSRP, and 3080 is 80% over MSRP roughly, though the 3090 is "only" 40% over MSRP. The RTX 30 series are huge moneymakers for scalpers, with over $9 million dollars in profits just on eBay alone.

Xbox

Console Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Scalper/eBay Profits	Total Sales
Xbox Series S	$299	6863	$469	$500	$385	$304	$1,481,654	$3,533,691
Xbox Series X	$499	22932	$865	$895	$639	$507	$8,609,715	$20,052,783

The Xbox Series S/X are Microsoft's new gaming consoles, with the Series S being slightly weaker than the Series X.

Moving to the gaming consoles, demand is far higher than the CPUs and GPUs, and pricing is trends reflect that. Before the Xbox was launched a cheaper time to "buy" an Xbox, with the launch of the Xboxes driving prices up 30% for the Series X and 15% for the Series S. The price hike seems to be abating somewhat in the past couple of weeks, though still over 50% MSRP. It is easily seen that the Series X is more popular, with over 3 times the number of sales as the Series S, and scalpers making over $9 million in profits from the Xboxes.

PS5

Console Graph	MSRP	Total Sold	Median Price	Past Week Median Price	Casual Scalper Break Even	Sophisticated Scalper Break Even	Scalper/eBay Profits	Total Sales
PS5 Digital	$399	7322	$937	$1025	$516	$406	$4,294,061	$7,215,539
PS5 Disc	$499	25642	$1021	$1101	$642	$507	$14,742,432	$27,537,790

The PS5 Disc/Digital are Sony's new gaming consoles to compete with the Xbox Series S/X. The only difference between the PS5's is the Digital version has no disc drive and can only download games to play while the Disc can have a disc inserted to play.

But the worst pricing is reserved for the PS5. The Disc version is going for 300% MSRP, and the Digital for 200% MSRP! Over 32,000 PS5s have been sold on eBay, resulting in scalpers netting $19 million in profits. Again, as with the Xbox, it was cheaper to preorder on eBay, and when the consoles launched demand spiked up and has continued increase with a slight decrease in the past couple of weeks. Perhaps most interesting is the relationship between the PS5 and Xbox. The PS5 has sold ~13% more units, and the Disc version is 18% more expensive than the Series X. The PS5 Digital is twice as expensive as the Series S. It's hard to see why someone would buy a PS5 Digital vs. the Disc on eBay with the median price difference being $76.

Summary

In short, scalpers have made $82 million in sales, $39 million in profit since September on just these 14 products on eBay. But let's not forget eBay and PayPal, taking in $6.6 million and $2.4 million, respectively, in fees for providing the platform and payment options. With eBay's fairly high fees, I assume it's the place scalpers choose last as FB Marketplace, Craigslist, other forums/discords offer better profit margins, so this analysis can only be a proxy for the overall scalping market. I would conservatively guess the real scalping market is at least 2-5x larger (personally I think 10x+); it's clear how scalping is a very lucrative career option for someone of dubious morals. For Zen 3, there's some hope in sight by early next year; for the rest, until supply meets demand it's pretty bleak.

Also it looks like The Verge had a similar idea to mine, posted a couple of days after me, glad to see there's interest in this! The true price of a PlayStation 5

Future Articles:

Part 1: An analysis of the $82 million eBay Scalping Market for Xbox, PS5, AMD, and NVIDIA
Part 2: An analysis of eBay tech scalpers
Part 3: Predicting future pricing (probably with XGBoost)
Part 4-?: A walkthrough of the code used in these analyses
Part TBD: A retrospective (once pricing has settled)