Home Article The scalping and greed of 3rd party Raspberry Pi sellers

The scalping and greed of 3rd party Raspberry Pi sellers

by shedboy71

If you have been following the Raspberry Pi news in the last couple of years you will be aware of massive shortages in hardware for various reasons, one disgusting thing that I have noticed in this time is scalping.

scalping is the practice of using bots to bulk buy tickets from licensed sources and then sell them for a profit. The same applies to electronics and famously the Sony Playstation 5 and XBox suffered from this along with graphics card

Now we have electronics such as the Raspberry Pi suffering from disgusting greed – want to see what I mean, read on.

I’m not going to put a link to the Amazon listing – I don’t want anyone to visit this but here is the price at the time of writing

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB) at £169.99 from Amazon.co.uk – no thats not a joke, a complete and utter ripoff and a disgrace that this is happening.

For context – these are the prices from Pihut in the UK an authorized dealer

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (1GB) £40
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (2GB) £52
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB) £62.50
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB) £85.50

Now the price on Amazon fluctuates but thats a markup of over £100. Thats a disgrace and much as it doesn’t surprise me, lets be honest Amazon isn’t going to do about it.

Incidentally Ebay – unsurprisingly was no better.

Options

Now, I would recommend you visit https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-model-b/?variant=raspberry-pi-4-model-b-8gb  and look at the authorized dealers and then if they have an option to subscribe or be alerted if there is any stock.

For example Pimoroni recently got a batch of 2gb and 4gb and restricted these to 1 per customer, I got the alert and nabbed one of each.

Much as this is a Raspberry Pi site I would actually seriously consider whatever your use case is and perhaps select a different SBC, there are many options from Banana Pi, OrangePi, Mango Pi, Odroid and others.

It depends on your needs – you can easily use one of the SBCs above for a basic computer, retro gaming setup, plex server, nas and connecting electronic sensors. I think you should investigate these, you can easily get these board for similar prices

Now its easy for me to say that, I have the boards but it would nice to make the greedy sellers be left with stock they can’t sell – if they care

If you do see these listings – take note of the companies/people and never buy anything from them

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