How are Old-stock prices justified?

Tiberiusisgame · November 20, 2017

Not a rant, just a genuine question about the thinking of it. Usually companies price things to move, especially when the products literally age on the shelves. What happened?

I'm one of the folks who bought my 980s after the 970 Memory Gate debacle, mere months before the 980ti announcement. I regret... everything. ;-) I decided to wait for the next generation of cards to consider the Ti, expecting the market to continue the way it had for years, and for a very short time, Amazon's warehouse was selling brand-new 980ti's for ~$300USD. I passed on that deal expecting things to carry on. Then mining resurfaced (see what I did there?). I appreciate that, memory shortages and profiteering are the reasons for inflated current graphics card prices. That doesn't explain why both new old-stock and used or refurbished/repaired cards from previous generations are listed on Amazon, New Egg, EVGA's B-stock, and other resellers, as more expensive than current generation cards, which you can still find. Supply and Demand can't be that powerful...

As an example:

On New Egg, 980s are ~$600USD, Ti's ~$800USD and greater, B-Stock wants ~$900USD for a Titan X whose spec underpreforms compared to, say, the 1080TI FTW directly next to it at $759USD.

I'm not going to buy any of these cards but I welcome anyone in-the-know to speak up about this practice, or put me in my place and tell me it's always been this way and I'm just inattentive to detail.

Brooksie359 · November 20, 2017

Probably for people who are dumb enough to buy them for dumb things like sli and such. Also people might buy them not realizing they are overpriced as well.

minibois · November 20, 2017

They already bought the cards, so selling them for a 'logical Price's in terms of how the market is, would mean they would be selling it with a less.

So one day they can either throw these items in the bargain bin, or someone ends up buying them because "this video from 3 years ago told me this GPU was great"

Vantage9 · November 20, 2017

Most of this has to do with retailer to manufacturer relationships.

Your average retailer doesn't keep a lot of inventory. A particular Microcenter might only have 5 of any given video card at a time. So if they end up sitting on four 980Ti's, they're not committing a ton of money to those units. It doesn't hurt them to let it sit for a while and try to get full price. If they reduce the prices, they will likely not make any money on inventory that they already paid the manufacturer for.

The cheapest 980Ti on Newegg right now is $800, but that's a retailer. You can buy a B-Stock 980Ti from EVGA for $487, as they're a manufacturer.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ60U4016&cm_re=980ti-_-9SIA0AJ60U4016-_-Product

https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=06G-P4-0998-RX

Tiberiusisgame · November 20, 2017

5 minutes ago, Vantage9 said:

Most of this has to do with retailer to manufacturer relationships.

Your average retailer doesn't keep a lot of inventory. A particular Microcenter might only have 5 of any given video card at a time. So if they end up sitting on four 980Ti's, they're not committing a ton of money to those units. It doesn't hurt them to let it sit for a while and try to get full price. If they reduce the prices, they will likely not make any money on inventory that they already paid the manufacturer for.

The cheapest 980Ti on Newegg right now is $800, but that's a retailer. You can buy a B-Stock 980Ti from EVGA for $487, as they're a manufacturer.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ60U4016&cm_re=980ti-_-9SIA0AJ60U4016-_-Product

https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=06G-P4-0998-RX

That's a good point regarding retailer versus manufacturer, especially in MicroCenter or New Egg's case. But I wonder if that's truly the same for a company like Amazon.

That also doesn't address the issue of EVGA selling the Titan X for more than the 1080Ti sitting next to it despite the performance differential, right? I figured I was missing something and that I needed to read between the spec lines, like only folks in-the-know would pass up that Titan X. Who would buy that after comparing the two? Trickery aside...

Vantage9 · November 20, 2017

6 minutes ago, Tiberiusisgame said:

That's a good point regarding retailer versus manufacturer, especially in MicroCenter or New Egg's case. But I wonder if that's truly the same for a company like Amazon.

That also doesn't address the issue of EVGA selling the Titan X for more than the 1080Ti sitting next to it despite the performance differential, right? I figured I was missing something and that I needed to read between the spec lines, like only folks in-the-know would pass up that Titan X. Who would buy that after comparing the two? Trickery aside...

Lots of special cases.

Amazon is like no other retailer. They have warehouses of inventory, but only certain kinds of inventory. A lot of stuff that says its being sold "by Amazon" is actually coming from another retailer, re-seller, or manufacturer - depending. Amazon's entire business model is built on this network of sources. If you want to be a top-tier Amazon partner, you have to be able to meet their requirements for things like Prime shipping, etc.
Titans, of any generation, are rare. They don't make many of them at all. They can retain full price simply out of scarcity, not based on performance.
This is actually true (supply vs performance) for many PC components, regardless of scarcity. For example, old CPU models retain their prices because they aren't cross compatible with different chipsets. So if a company MUST replace a CPU in a server with an older chipset, they HAVE to buy that older model CPU or else replace the whole system.

Tiberiusisgame · November 20, 2017

Very informative. Thanks for taking the time! I hadn't considered the Titan rarity component, and as I look now, 4th Gen CPUs are also elevated in price... and motherboards.