Introduction
A while back, I wrote about the SNES Classic pre-orders, and I’m sure most of you forgot about it. Well, it turned out that Best Buy had the preorder up on Monday night for about 15 minutes. I was able to grab a handful there. Then I heard that Amazon went live some time on Monday night and had no limit on it; murmurs of some people gettign 50 and 99 of them. The Best Buy presale should have made your Spidey senses tingle because on Tuesday, all hell broke loose on pre-orders. Let’s go down the play by play:
- 10:00AM PST – Walmart had it up and lasted a minute. No exaggeration. All of Reddit pounced on it
- 10:17AM – Target had it up but no one could check out after the first minute. It kept dropping out of your cart when you tried to submit your order.
- 10:30AM – Word got out that Gamestop was taking pre-orders in-store. I calculated my time vs ROI, and it wasn’t high enough for me to leave work to secure ONE system.
- 11:30AM – Gamestop’s site had it up, but the site was essentially down all day. I also learned their stupid app doesn’t let you check out; checking out sends you to the mobile web page. FACEPALM.
- 11:55AM – Thinkgeek had bundles of it up. The decision to buy a useless bundle was tough. Even when you tried to check out, the system froze for over 5 minutes. I eventually closed the window. The next day, I got an order cancellation email. Some people got order confirmations. I’m actually glad I didn’t get it because I didn’t want to deal with the bundle
- 2:20PM – Toys R Us says they are not doing preorders. Probably because they like their site being up and functional.
- 2:37PM – Target’s site is back up and I was able to get a few. That lasted about 3 minutes.
And that was that.
Conclusion
I scored about 8 total, assuming they all ship. I don’t even plan on keeping one because I was playing some NES games on my Fire TV, and realized how much a time suck playing video games is, so I stopped. But you do you. And really it’s not even about the money (I’m guessing the profit will be about $50-$75 per system once Christmas nears.) It’s the fun of trying to get one. I got more of a rush of trying to pre order one than when I’ll sell one.
It’s a complex feeling that I missed pre-orders because I was on vacation. Can’t win them all though, I guess. Was the NES classic this much of a pre-order fiasco? I only got on that train super late during a restock but that still led to a profit of about $150 per console as they were announced as being cancelled a few days after I got 10 of them.
I don’t usually play this game.. but….
I sold ~300 nintendo switches from Mar-June — made between $30 and $150 per unit, probably average around $70 across the 300. Was great for generating spend and burning through signup bonuses. One funny tidbit is that when I was trying to get one for a niece, I actually paid a $20 premium for one because I was all out of stock. lol.
For the SNES classic, I got 1. Not for lack of trying. My guess is that you’ll do a heck of a lot better than $50-75 per unit if you sell them quickly. Probably $100-$150.
Hahaha 300..holy crap. How’d you even source that many? I think I did less than 10 of those and then I was worried prices would bounce back. Congrats.
It was not 300 in 1 shot. But if you gave me 300 day 1, I most likely would have taken the risk. Some weeks I’d get 5-10, some 10-20, and some 30-40. By the end there if I was paying full price + tax I was only making $30 per unit. But it was so easy, as it entailed only taking a picture of the serial #, slapping a label on the box, retaping the box, and leaving them with my doorman. He’ll get an extra large tip for Christmas this year.
For the SNES I already pre-sold it (I’m a top rated seller now lol). Ebay didn’t cancel my pre-sale, but asked me nicely to not do it again until 30 days before 9/29. I sold it for $275 (minus fees). I probably won’t sell a bunch of these unless I can figure out a way to scale it without much of a brain drain/time sink.
Did you sell most of the switches on ebay or amazon?
Man I was up on everyon’e in stock alert and not one sent me anything – not even after the fact. I loathe reddit and that is my problem haha.
Are you willing to part with one?? And for how much? 😉
Alas I was too slow for any preorder . But totally understand the “rush” of getting one its like winning an auction and its quite fun.