For some subset of retail scalpers, they can be seen as taking on the risk of engaging in low-trust e-commerce; I can certainly beat the prices I pay for many of the goods I purchase, but doing so greatly increases my risk profile to, for example, somebody stealing my identity / credit card information.
For others, they provide a kind of availability arbitrage, by providing access to the same goods across multiple websites; I can pick the e-commerce portal I want to use, and trust that retail scalpers will ensure the goods I want to purchase will make it available there.
And for yet others, they are backing up purchases with their own reputation—pretty much every large retail company is reselling goods they purchased from companies in China which a buyer would be dubious about purchasing from; Etsy is full of resellers of Chinese goods in this fashion.
And on the subject of Etsy, there’s also the dubious service of X-laundering; one example being ethical laundering, where a reseller sells goods from companies that people wouldn’t purchase from themselves for ethical reasons; another example being status-good laundering, where a reseller sells goods that people purchase with the plausible misconception that the seller is handcrafting them. In all of these cases, the reseller is performing a service with regard to the original seller, and in some of these cases, the reseller may be performing a service for the end-consumer as well.
There’s a wide variety of defenses for the behavior, basically.
For some subset of retail scalpers, they can be seen as taking on the risk of engaging in low-trust e-commerce; I can certainly beat the prices I pay for many of the goods I purchase, but doing so greatly increases my risk profile to, for example, somebody stealing my identity / credit card information.
For others, they provide a kind of availability arbitrage, by providing access to the same goods across multiple websites; I can pick the e-commerce portal I want to use, and trust that retail scalpers will ensure the goods I want to purchase will make it available there.
And for yet others, they are backing up purchases with their own reputation—pretty much every large retail company is reselling goods they purchased from companies in China which a buyer would be dubious about purchasing from; Etsy is full of resellers of Chinese goods in this fashion.
And on the subject of Etsy, there’s also the dubious service of X-laundering; one example being ethical laundering, where a reseller sells goods from companies that people wouldn’t purchase from themselves for ethical reasons; another example being status-good laundering, where a reseller sells goods that people purchase with the plausible misconception that the seller is handcrafting them. In all of these cases, the reseller is performing a service with regard to the original seller, and in some of these cases, the reseller may be performing a service for the end-consumer as well.
There’s a wide variety of defenses for the behavior, basically.