Reselling News: Prime Big Deal Days Returns October 6 and Zelda Switch 2 Presales Outrun eBay's Refund Window

Q4 stopped being a vague season this week and started being a set of dates. Two of them got fixed in the last several days, and both of them decide something for you whether or not you write them down.

Amazon picked the day Q4 starts

Amazon announced on September 15 that Prime Big Deal Days returns October 6 and 7. Deals open at 12:01 a.m. Pacific on October 6 and run for 48 hours across more than 35 categories, with fresh drops three times a day at midnight, 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. Pacific. It is Prime members only, and Amazon is openly framing it as the kickoff to the holiday season.

If you sell used clothing on eBay, an Amazon sale looks like somebody else's problem. It is not. For two days, a very large number of shoppers get retrained on what things cost new. The listing you are competing with that week is often not another used listing at all, it is a new one at a holiday price. That pressure lands hardest where new and used sit close together in a buyer's head: small electronics, kitchen gear, toys, and plain brand basics that anyone can buy new in one click.

The calendar makes it tighter. USPS holiday prices take effect October 4, two days before Amazon opens. So the same week that your cost to ship a box goes up is the week your competition's price comes down.

Your move: get anything seasonal listed before October 4, not during that week. Then leave your prices alone through the sixth and seventh rather than reacting to two slow days. A quiet weekend during a Prime event is not a signal that your item is priced wrong. It is a signal that your buyer is somewhere else for 48 hours.

The Zelda presales have a refund problem baked into the dates

Nintendo announced on September 8 that the Nintendo Switch 2 Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Edition ships October 29, at $519.99 in the US. Preorders went fast, and the resale listings followed within hours.

Value Added Resource went through those listings on September 10 and found bundles of the console, Pro Controller, case and game asking $1,700 and $2,000, against roughly $720 to buy the same four things from Nintendo.

The markup is the boring part. The dates are the part worth reading twice. One of those listings carried an estimated delivery of September 14 to 18, for hardware that does not exist in anyone's hands until October 29. Under eBay's Money Back Guarantee, a buyer has until 30 calendar days after the estimated or actual delivery date to report an item not received. A September 18 estimate puts that door closed around October 18, eleven days before Nintendo ships the console.

That is a buyer with no protection and a seller with a refund request arriving through some other channel, in November, on an item that already counted as a sale. eBay's presale rules exist for exactly this: the listing has to say it is a presale and the item has to ship inside 40 business days, and the handling time is supposed to cover the wait.

Your move: if you are flipping a preorder, set the handling time to the real release date and say the release date in the description. An estimate you know is wrong is not a shortcut to a faster sale, it is a dispute you scheduled for yourself. And if you are the buyer sourcing inventory this way, check the delivery estimate against the actual release date before you pay, because a seller who got that wrong has already told you something.

The takeaway

Neither of these is a rule change. Both are dates, and dates are what quietly decide whether a Q4 goes well. One says when the noise starts. The other says when a buyer's protection runs out on an item nobody has yet.

Working backward from the dates on the calendar, instead of forward from whatever is in the pile, is the habit that separates a good fourth quarter from a frantic one. That planning is what members work through together in The Income Lab.

Hero image: Amazon Prime delivery vans parked in Gainesville, Florida, photographed November 16, 2018 by Todd Van Hoosear, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.