It's worth pointing out that "sold" doesn't actually mean the buyer has any intention of paying. It seems fairly common in this scenario for people to put fake bids on products like this for whatever reason. And the winner in that particular action has a 0% positive feedback rating, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
When I was in college, I resold high demand systems around the holidays. Some examples of this include the slim PS2, the Nintendo DS, and the XBox 360.
I can tell you from this experience that people pay. The bids are not joke bids. They are people who are willing to pay market rate for high demand items because they want them now. God bless them. Furthermore, you can require payment before purchase.
I did this a couple times for limited edition systems. You just have to wait in line early and get as many as the store will let you.
It's not a tremendous amount of money but if you sell a few $300 systems for 2-3x the original price and you're a college student or such, it adds up fast.
The last time I tried doing it was for the limited edition pikachu 3DS; upon seeing a line of 50+ people in Oakland (most of which probably had the same intention as me), I decided that the gain was not worth it anymore.
I recall my friends doing this for the Wii back in the day. They put in reservations at GameStop and checked daily at various stores. I'd imagine it's the same way. You just have to get lucky sometimes.
While this does happen once in a while it's not as common as you make it out to be. I resold Chewbacca masks[1] during that hype for an obscene markup and everything I sold was a real transaction. I sent the masks, got paid, everyone was happy. But really, people paid and they sold fast, within the hour.
> It seems fairly common in this scenario for people to put fake bids on products like this for whatever reason.
One popular reason may be "boosting" the auction. A common practice is that when someone puts an item for sale as an auction, they will ask a friend to bid on that item when the auction seems to be settling on too low a price. If it happens that after one of such boosts nobody else bids and the friend ends up winning, the friend will just pick "personal collection"/"cash on delivery" as payment/delivery options and never pick the item up; the original owner will wait few days and post the item on an auction again.
