Dear tech industry, we don’t need to follow gaming with terrible product resale values
Recently a story made headlines about a potential seller finding out how bad Microcenter’s resale value is for one Nvidia GeForce RTX4090 Graphics Card.
The retailer only offered $700 for a currently priced card for almost $2000 in its own online store, less than half its original value. And keep in mind that this is a current generation high-end component, easily the best graphics card available today, and not something from two generations ago.
Naturally, there are several factors that play a role in the trade-in value, including the condition of the product in question. However, Wccftech reported that this was a simple search via the Microcenter website, meaning this value is the default. Compare this to what Newegg is offering, about $1,500 or more than twice as much, and you’ll see quite a discrepancy between the two amounts.
Microcenter is also a brick-and-mortar retailer, unlike Newegg, meaning its reach extends beyond just online shoppers and to more casual shoppers who may not be aware of how terrible that trade-in amount is compared to the competition. Something it shares with another major chain that buys and sells used products: Gamestop.
Although Gamestop is still far from its peak as the most popular gaming chain in the US, it is still well known and attracts many customers, including casual shoppers who simply want to buy the most popular game or console and are willing to trade older used games or consoles to exchange. products for it.
Gamestop has always been infamous for how little it offers customers for trade-ins, even becoming an internet meme, and yet it still attracts quite a few customers despite this. At one point it was estimated that the retailer made almost $1 billion in profit only from the used trade-in market. The company earned 48 cents in gross profit for every dollar it earned from its used games and consoles, which it achieved by reselling purchased used products at a much higher price.
So when I see a major retailer offering such a terrible resale value on a very recent product that it’s guaranteed to be resold at a higher price, I get flashbacks of a Gamestop employee gleefully announcing to me that my combined resale value of Final Fantasy X And Madden 2005 would be just over $3.
Hopefully the news will spread and encourage more buyers to shop for better prices instead of taking up Microcenter’s meager offer, and perhaps even stop Microcenter from misleading its customers in this way. This is behavior that needs to be nipped in the bud now, before it poisons the well and makes it much harder to sell and buy used components in the future.