How I made $660.43 in 3 days by selling old Playstation 2 systems on eBay (how you can too)

I really wish I had more information on why these things are valued at their current price. I was back in the U.S. for about two weeks. I get an e-mail from one of my employees that starts asking me a lot of questions about Playstation 2. His questions lead to his actual question of "Can we get these?" I told him no as they aren't made anymore and didn't believe they were worth anything like most older electronics.

So I jump on eBay and find out that people are buying these in bulk for the average unit price of $42.00 - No wires, no controllers, no games - nothing but the console...

...but it gets better... they are BROKEN. The Playstation 2 units that have been selling for an average of $42.00 do not even work! Broken ones have actually been selling for More!

So I went out on a 4 hour quest to buy some of these things. First thing I did was I posted 2 ads up on Craigslist saying I was buying these for $10 and would pick them up. I bought 6 units this way. One person had 3 of them.

Next I called all of the local pawnshops and asked if they had any. Every single one of them said "Yes."

Now that I had 6 of these and a bunch of controllers that were thrown in by the people that sold them to me, I drove over to 5 pawn shops and most of them were selling bundles of controllers with the Playstation 2 system for $15 - $20.00 - I talked them all down to $10 and I left with 15 units from 5 different pawnshops. This brought my total to 21 units.

I later headed over to a local video game store, but didn't get that great of a deal but managed to buy 4 for $25.00 each with 2 controllers.

I now had 25 units, all purchased within 1 day for $310, plus $25 for fuel driving to all of those places, so that puts me at a grand total of $335.00

I listed up 5 PS2's with no controllers or anything aside the console, and because my research shows the keywords "Broken" seems to get more traffic/bids/sell for more I put the words "Not Broken" - because all of them but 1 which isn't included in these 5 separate listings actually did work. I put them up in a BIN of $44.99 with Free Shipping. All 5 of them sold within 24 hours - 4 of them were purchased by 1 buyer. After Fees and Shipping and excluding my initial investment, I made $106 and wasn't really too impressed for some reason.

Now was the major test, I listed a bulk amount of 20 units mixed with the large and slim PS2's, and these sold for $800 + $35.00 Shipping. After fees and shipping and my initial investment, my profit was $472.43. This took about 36 hours to sell, I was a bit skeptical that I had priced it too high but sure enough, it sold. Unfortunately I should have waited to ship out 4 of the 5 units because the guy who bought 4 of them from my individual listings was the same guy who bought the 20 units.

Now were the last bits and pieces. I had 14 controllers, 4 memory cards, some multiple controller adapter thing, cords, and a couple random games, and these sold for $82.00 after profit and fees.

My total profit for this entire thing was $660.43.

Another interesting tidbit, the guy who bought 24 of them from me seems to buy thousands of units per month of these things. You can only see so far back into someones feedback history but every single feedback left for him was when he bought something that was PS2 related. He has over 18,000 feedback too. I wish I knew what he was doing with them!