I know a lot of you want a Nexus 4, the thing sold out in an hour for goodness sake, but please, for the love of all that is Google, don’t resort to paying this absurd mark-up. Updated with response from the vendor.
MobiCity has the Nexus 4 in stock right now, and it’s charging…wait for it…$569 for the 16GB model. $569. That’s a $170 mark-up on the Nexus 4 from Google Play (if it were ever there).
You could do a lot with $170, especially around the Christmas season. You’d have to be super desperate or absurdly wealthy to consider throwing away that sort of money just to have it right now.
Update: so MobiCity tells me that the mark-up isn’t coming from them, rather they’re making a loss on the units. MobiCity’s supplier is charging the mark-up and MobiCity has no choice but to pass it on. Alistair Eldred of MobiCity explains:
Our pre-orders were originally listed at $499 on advice from our supplier. We didn’t expect to sell many, we just listed at our lowest mark up band and put it on the site so that people could compare with our other top handsets. However due to demand as direct stocks were delayed and we unexpectedly started receiving orders. We upped the price to $529 (although in retrospect we should have gone higher) after updated costs projections started coming in.
Where possible we honour all pre-orders, even at a loss and when we found stock recently we took it in as we pride ourselves on being the market leader and having access to the latest phones first. The cost of that stock was higher than the original pre-order price, and that’s before warranty, handling, acquisition and sale costs get added on top. After factoring those in we reach the current price, and as we had a few left after fulfilling the pre-orders we decided to onsell these at that landed cost price so those who have been waiting for stock can get them in affordable a manner as possible.