Recently the Sony Playstation and Nintendo Wii have hit the streets with a small number of units and insane customer demand. The interesting part around this how Sony and
its retail partners handled the demand.

In Canada, Toy-r-us and Sears Canada seemed to take the fairly normal route of accepting pre-orders on a first-come/first-serve approach. This is pretty simple but the challenge is when to start accepting pre-orders.

BestBuy took a different approach and did not accept pre-orders prior the console launches. The result was a long list of people waiting outside of each of stores and an
overloaded BestBuy.ca. The BestBuy approach created some interesting situations where a variety of groups employed ‘homeless individuals’ to stand inline to buy the consoles. The Toronto Star has a good write-up on this process and it’s a common approach for high demand ticket sales.

The result is that many of these consoles are now being re-sold on Ebay and other online sites at a considerable mark-up. This essentially puts the consoles well outside the price range of their target consumers.

The concert ticket industry has had problems with this for years has developed a number of processes to stop professional groups from profiting on these launches. Approaches for tickets include arm bands, lotteries and other scenarios to make it less profitable. None of these are prefect and it would appear that we’ll be seeing more of these approaches in the consumer electronics market.