Should Ebay/Black Library work to ban Pre-Orders of limited editions?

[Krelious]

I'm just thinking out loud here and I think the idea has been put forth before but I think since the recent fiasco of the BL celebration and the launch of End and the Death vol.1 It seems a lot of scalpers really screwed up the Black Library website itself going down (at least in my region) I mean its not nice regardless of your income to be a legitimate fan of the series and then find the book you want has been bought out instantly and people are holding onto copies solely to sell them for in this case a 1000% markup on the original price. 

 

I can understand if say after a while someone wants to sell a book they are no longer interested in or they are looking to make money off their own property, that is your own business but I think its really frustrating you essentially have these grifters in society making life worse for everyone else. I think GW/Ebay should send a message to these people by actively banning them from trying to sell physical products they don't even possess yet.  I know this issue is very old but I feel like some sort of pressure needs to be put on both E-Bay and Games workshop to prevent this in the future. I mean for example I have several copies of collectors editions of many authors and books outside this genre that are worth quite a bit of money and I would not dream of selling them because I love those books.

 

To me it really ruins the experience of reading/collecting the novels and kind of brings a bit of bitterness being forced to accept my lot and forced to accept that these people can engage in this immoral practice with impunity.  I mean just think of how many special editions were bought by these profiteers that dont sell, and just sit there in those boxes never being read or used, never being appreciated.  I tried rationalizing it to myself but after a while I realized I was in denial about the situation and now im genuinely upset as nearly every day I see these listings on ebay, I see listings for older limited edition books that have never been opened and I get pissed off. Not to mention all the insane price gouging that goes on for those mass market paperback books, its not isolated to one site either, and I see people snapping up books instantly in a panicked state. I think if people are buying hobby products out of fear, there is a serious problem in society.

 

I mean imagine how many of these people looking to make money off these products dont give a :cuss: about Warhammer 40k and are just doing it for the sake of making money and likely in some sense take delight in screwing you over while smiling to themselves as "some dumbass nerd bought this book for $800 haha". 

 

My sense is that a defeatist attitude should not be entertained and people should at the very least be sending e-mails to GW complaining about the issue. Saying it is what it is and throwing your hands up in the air only encourages the problem. Really im putting this out there because in a sane and balanced world GW would have a solution in place for when Vol.2 as well as their other novels. 

 

I am very well aware that this is not an isolated issue to Warhammer nor is it new or surprising. I think something should be said. To me this issue of people buying out books to price gouge fans is ruining my enjoyment of the hobby and has also spoiled my long term investment in the setting as I am now stressed out about making sure I can buy copies of books I want on the pre-order date and checking the GW release schedule even setting alarms so I wake up on time only for many of these books to sit around unread because I fear being price gouged in the future. The world of 2023 is very different from 2006.

 

I can remember my first Warhammer 40k novel was a copy of Nightbringer that my friend gave to me because he knew I would enjoy it and was constantly excited to talk about the game and the lore with me. Now what's left is a sour memory and at this point I feel regret that this hobby is now bringing me stress and my old passion feels more like  it has warped into a burden or an obligation at times.

 

Quite frankly I just wanted to vent, I hate the people who see this hobby/setting as means to exploit fans for money because at the end of the day the fact they are getting away with it and thriving is really bothering me because  for me its an insult to the heroic ethos of the setting. Its an insult to everything I love about it. 

 

 

[OpossumStrong]

I think they should time limit it, lets say "you can't sell this product untill *date* after release", or cap the price they can ask for this product untill *date*, its very problematic, you need someone to give this info to ebay for each book, and then ebay need someone to watch over such listings.

 

The best we could do now is to report scalpers for overpricing, sometimes they do remove such listings...

[Tolmeus]

I totally get your point and also symphatize with it, but it is not realistic  that any of both companies is going to change something about it. They simply do not care as long as they make their money with the products. 

[Nagashsnee]

Once you buy the book BL doesnt really get to tell you what to do with it. Like how would you even prove which ebay account is which GW order? You think scalpers are too lazy to make a GW account with a different name? Cant go off address, at Uni i lived in shared accommodation with 3 other warhammer players.  Are you going to cross refrence the LE number to ebay sales? 

 

All they have to do is:

1) Offer made to order, doesnt even need to be book by book, just say at the end of the Siege we will do a made to order window, wont be signed but other then that same as LE. Bam no stress no fuss one single window of orders that they can handle and process with a delivery date to match their needs. 

2) Make more le books.  If scalpers are selling at 1000% then the demand is there. Go up 500 copies, then 500 more, find the sweet spot. The fact that the siege of terra got the same number of limited editions as say Gav Thropes Dawn of Fire book is a joke. 

3) They are not making enough bookS in general and they dont care, for ages now popular BL books are gone in a day or 2. Angron was gone in what 1-2 hours? This is not down to scalpers, this is company policy, they dont want things laying around the warehouse, they are happy to make less if it guarantees the book get cleared ASAP.  But i promise you even without 1 scalper the number of certain book ( LE Siege of Terra) at present would not fill demand. And its tricky, which book sells in what quantity is hard to foresee. My favorite bakery sells out of my favourite tart every day, and when i asked why not make more? It would be a whole new tray, 2 trays are too much most days so they have non sale  items left, so 1 tray= 100% sales and they perfer that to MAYBE making more sales but risking X number left over.   

4) Common effing sense, Black Library celebration weekend with multiple new LE, not telling people if things like First Founding was limited, dropping new minis at the same date/time, etc etc. It was always going to be a clusterxxxx. Thats not scalpers thats too much dropping at the same time with a FOMO based marketing strategy, which brings me to...

5) They need to cut the FOMO out, they DRIVE people to go mental on saturdays, new army deal with good discount? limited, new guard tank? sold out day 1 guess you get it when you get it, new generic BL book by popular author? Oh dear you logged in 10 mins after release? Too bad so sad!. GW wants FOMO, they pushed FOMO, they love FOMO, FOMO= MONEY. 

 

You want to send GW a message? STOP BUYING STUFF. Its the only thing companies understand. The day books/minis stop selling out is the day scalpers lose money and GW management starts problem solving.  

[Tolmeus]

47 minutes ago, OpossumStrong said:

The best we could do now is to report scalpers for overpricing, sometimes they do remove such listings...

 

Did not know that this is an option, that could be worth a try as a community effort. 

[OpossumStrong]

16 minutes ago, Tolmeus said:

 

Did not know that this is an option, that could be worth a try as a community effort. 

Yeah the problem they can relist it after a while, as well ebay can reject the report based on "this product is not available to buy(at the gw website) therefore we can't confirm its overpriced" but I agree with you, there is too much effort for them to put to handle scalpers, they don't care enough,and to be honest i can't blame them, i only blame them for the same mistake, website being "dead" at the preorder day.

[RedFurioso]

3 hours ago, Nagashsnee said:

Like how would you even prove which ebay account is which GW order?

Each LE book is numbered.

[m_r_parker]

I honestly thought it was already a part of eBay terms that you couldn’t sell anything that was not available or you did not possess. I seem to recall previously that scalpers were hit hard by GW reporting mass listings to eBay citing that the items listed were not yet available and should be taken down. Maybe I’m misremembering. 
 

but in all actuality, all that will happen is the same thing but a week later. There’s no reliable option to limiting scalper activities, aside from removing the desirability factor (I.e. the product being limited). It may be a dick move, but there’s nothing stopping anyone from buying a product on the basis of a speculative return later on. I’ve seen it happen for these novels online, I’ve seen people at the old FW HH Weekenders who would literally only buy a ticket to attend the pre-sales, but what they can, and they would be selling on eBay before the first seminar had started. These guys were known, some people had issue with them because they were scalpers, but from the profits they were making they could buy a weekend ticket with no intention of attending anything and still make a decent return on investment. 
 

and for all the hi-tech solutions, there are plenty of low-tech workarounds. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would be willing to create an account and buy an item on someone’s behalf if they were to get £20 out of it. Skips a lot of the hi tech solutions; different name and address, different IP address, different payment details. 
 

this is all assuming the internal GW IT is decent enough to attempt to tackle this head-on. I’m betting it isn’t.

 

as for tracking Ltd Ed numbers:

1) I don’t believe GW are currently tracking which number goes to which order, or is even capable of it without it becoming a manual process and a lot of effort.

2) there’s nothing making sellers identify which number they have on a listing

so unless GW actively buy back their Ltd Ed’s at scalper prices to track down which number they had, but have no way to link it back to an account and personal details…

[cheywood]

Scalpers are hitting pretty much everything these days. Shoes, game consoles, graphics cards. If it’s a hard to attain item you can practically guarantee someone on eBay will be selling it for hundreds more than MSRP. If massive companies can’t solve the issue I’m skeptical that GW can do anything about it. 

[Felix Antipodes]

Speaking as one of the many who had their run of SoT LE broken with TE&TD1, I just don't see that anything can be done about this that would be effective in the long term.  At least BL makes a serious number of their LE.  I recently saw a listing from another publisher for a LE of just 230 copies.  Wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that bunfight.

[Nagashsnee]

14 hours ago, RedFurioso said:

Each LE book is numbered.

If only they could sell the book without showing the number...oh wait. 

[Noserenda]

I too used to get caught up in the limited edition madness for the old HH novellas and since switching to ebooks and audiobooks i havnt experienced any of that stress and nonsense, plus i dont have to store all the books! 

That said when my old E-ink kindle dies i may have issues...

[Ubiquitous1984]

I've just gone through all the ebay sale listings for The End and the Death LE.

 

205 copies have been sold so far, and by my calculations this has generated £82000 in revenue for the scalpers (this isn't 100% accurate due to currency variations, but it's 'roughly' correct.)

 

There are still many copies for sale on ebay so this £82k figure will continue to rise.

 

Meanwhile the 2500 copies that BL sold for £50 each 'only' generated £125k total.

 

At what point do BL/GW take a look at this and decide to either increase the print run, or increase the price they sell their top-tier LE's for?  Or both??

[theSpirea]

2 minutes ago, Ubiquitous1984 said:

I've just gone through all the ebay sale listings for The End and the Death LE.

 

205 copies have been sold so far, and by my calculations this has generated £82000 in revenue for the scalpers (this isn't 100% accurate due to currency variations, but it's 'roughly' correct.)

 

There are still many copies for sale on ebay so this £82k figure will continue to rise.

 

Meanwhile the 2500 copies that BL sold for £50 each 'only' generated £125k total.

 

At what point do BL/GW take a look at this and decide to either increase the print run, or increase the price they sell their top-tier LE's for?  Or both??

 

Increasing the print run for the existing series doesn't make much sense. What's the point of having Book 9 5K copies but only 2.5K copies of the first book?

 

It's also necessary to take into consideration it's mainly the Horus Heresy series going for these rates and only the main books. Novellas aren't scalped that much, and Cthonia's Reckoning was up on GW for weeks and I doubt it sells for much on eBay (I've seen copies going for less than RRP).

 

Often you can read on forums people are not interested to invest in another series of LEs once the HH is done. You can compare the sold copies/prices on eBay for HH vs the DoF series.

[Lex D'Arquebus]

I've always wondered why they don't do a made to order preorder instead of limited editions?

Seems only the scalpers that benefit from the limited editions, I wonder if any of them work for GW?

[Sothalor]

It's probably a matter of logistical burden; ie. the amount of work and coordination both on the customer-facing end as well as dealing with printers and suppliers and order volume thresholds isn't seen as worthwhile compared to a neat round number of "order up 2500 copies, done."

[aa.logan]

Cthonia’s Reckoning wasn’t numbered, though , was it?

 

Post Aurelian, they went through a spell of made-to-order on the HH novellas, and the numbers fluctuated from 5,764 for Brotherhood of the Storm, to around 3,000 for subsequent titiles before settling again on fixed runs of 3-4,000 copies from Ravenlord onwards. At the last BL in 2019 Weekender, they said, when asked about increasing print runs- “ Not sure what the demand would be, considering slightly different version, finite audience, sales don’t really fill out. Considering alternatives.” There absolutely is demand now, and evidence of it. Anecdotally, I think that the printer they used changed at least once during that process and they’re currently using is different again- I’ve been told that the cost of increasing the print run is disproportionate, which is why they’re only doing 2,500 of these- an additional 500 would cost more per unit.

 

I would really like it if they did *something*, or at least even acknowledged the issues, but I fear they won’t. I’m one of those whose said they’re done with LEs once the Siege is over. Except Cypher. And others in that series. And the Primarchs books. And the HH Character Series. And Thd Emperor’s Gift. And the Black Legion Books. And Mega Editions with nice trinkets. And any that have a pretty cover. Or are out suitably far in advance.

 

I guess I’m as much a part of the problem as GW are…

[Felix Antipodes]

I still think the solution is maintain the LE runs as numbered runs while taking POD orders (in same print format as LE) for those that missed out on the LE but want to have matching books for their shelves.  The hard core fans will still fight for the signed LE and the rest can settle for a non-signed but identical set.

[Pacific81]

This is precisely why I let the series run ahead for a few years, because of this sort of BS. Saw a lot of genuine fans who had been waiting for that book get really frustrated when they couldn't get a copy and really felt for them.

 

It's definitely an issue and not just here, happens a lot with other things too as has been pointed out. Should GW do anything? You could make the argument that they 'dont care' as long as they have your money, but these are there biggest fans waiting to pay that much for a new release, and upsetting them isn't ideal for any company. Also, quite often having someone's hobby budget emptied out to pay the scalpers means less money to GW ultimately.

I'm not sure, maybe having something in the T&C to try and stop immediate re-sale might be an option, as might stopping the practice on eBay. I know there has been some success of stopping re-sale of tickets for sporting events or gigs, so it might be something they try. 

[ChargingSoll]

The past 3 limited editions I've tried to get Sanguinius, angron and cypher sold out before I even got a chance to go through my local Geedubs doors, it's becoming an issue that I can't even get hard back versions of these books till they get stock later. 

 

I can only hope they change how they do L.E in the future as its only fueling scalpers at this point. 

Edited March 11, 2023 by ChargingSoll
Typo

[aa.logan]

Just the 27 copies of Cypher listed on eBay so far…

[ChargingSoll]

Was about to say look at Cypher on ebay, they'll be more next Saturday when people get their book. 

 

Just depressing as random books are missing from my collection, 

(Don't even want to talk about the siege of terra resale issues)