How to Score a PS5 and not burn a hole in your wallet in the process
Backstory
Last time I bought a next generation console, it was the Nintendo Switch. In 2019 and it was as easy as going to a store and forking over the MSRP for the console.
Now, it is incredibly more difficult to find next generation consoles, especially if you’re trying to find a PS5 from a retailer instead of a scalper. If they do have it, it basically sells out from most places within a few seconds, and more often than not there’s only a few drops during the week.
In this article, I’ll describe what I had to go through in order to find a PS5 at retail price, as well as some tips that you can use in order to score yourself one.
Let’s dive in!
How I got my PS5
I’ll admit, I didn’t think it would be so difficult to find a PS5. I was originally going to buy a PS4, but the new ones are more expensive than a retail PS5, and the refurbished ones are almost as much it’s newer counterpart. So I decided to get a PS5 instead since it can play the PS4 games that I care about.
It only took me 4 days to purchase mine, but oh boy did I have to be glued to my phone’s notifications.
After realizing that no major US retail store had a PS5 in stock, I looked through Reddit for advice and I found a lot of different suggestions to increase my chances of purchasing a PS5. Some of them worked, some of them kinda didn’t do much.
What best worked for me was:
- Download an app called Hot Stock Alerts and enable notifications to know when a drop happened. You can also choose to pay to get priority notifications, but you should be ok without it.
- Log into the different retailers and add my billing and shipping information beforehand so that I can check out as quickly as possible.
There’s also some other things that you can do that may work as well, such as registering to Playstation Direct, which is basically an invite to purchase a PS5 when the next drop from Sony happens.
If you decide to go the Sony route though, there’s a small nuisance if you’ve never bought there before, you cannot add your billing information until you actually make a purchase.
There’s a trick though, you can add an item to your cart and proceed to checkout to add your information right before you place your order. When buying your PS5, all the information your entered before should still be there! Just remember to remove the item you added before checking out for your PS5.
For me though, I was able to purchase a PS5 Bundle from Costco. It seems like you may have a bit more time to make your purchase if you decide to buy the PS5 from a retailer that requires a membership , since I had a good 5 minutes in order to checkout since I forgot to add my shipping information to my Costco account. Oops.
With all of that, you should be good to go to purchase your new PS5! Just remember to be patient though since everyone is also trying to buy one.
Good luck.
