PC Graphics Card Scalping Has Died Off (For Now)

pcmag.com:

The days of scalpers snapping up PC graphics cards seems to be over due to low demand from buyers and thin profit margins from reselling the products. 

“Everyone’s basically over GPUs,” one reseller told PCMag. 

A major sign that scalping has plummeted can be found in the pricing for graphics cards on reselling sites such as eBay. Over the last year, the average selling prices for the latest Nvidia GPUs have fallen back to Earth. 

Instead, the eBay pricing is often close to the standard pricing for the GPUs at retailers, especially if you buy a product from Amazon Warehouse(Opens in a new window), which sells open-box and pre-owned items. This means scalpers can extract little profit from buying and then reselling a new GPU at current cost levels.

At the same time, supplies for GPUs at retailers such as Newegg and Best Buy have significantly improved, giving consumers less reason to buy from resellers. Both retailers have even been offering discounts on some product models.

“Yea scalping for GPUs is gone,” said Falcodrin Stock Alerts(Opens in a new window), a GPU restock tracking service. The demand is so low in some cases, buying a graphics card on the reselling site StockX(Opens in a new window) can be even cheaper than buying a brand-new GPU.  

"You can still sell, but for much lower than current new prices. It's making it really difficult for (cryptocurrency) miners to liquidate their cards," Falcodrin added.

We found similar sentiments in a chat room for House of Carts(Opens in a new window), one of the many “cook groups” online that focus on reselling in-demand goods to consumers. “GPU market is fried and PS5 was only good around Xmas,” wrote one member earlier this week. 

“Rest in peace sweet sweet GPUs,” added