Say I purchase a laptop from Amazon/Walmart/any big box store. I assume they note down the unique identifier for the device and link it to the purchase, which has my credit card information.
How would Ebay do this? I’m curious about the extent of information that the marketplace giants have of consumers purchasing electronics from them. Cheap Chinese gizmos might not have unique identifiers but a Dell Laptop certainly has a few.
I’m sure some here can imagine the technical reason for the question. Have a good day ahead!
That’s not typically how this works. A specific item, e.g. a specific PS5, is rarely ever tied to a new purchase. There’s no reason for it. They don’t care that a specific PS5 was sold to someone. Just that a PS5 was sold.
However, there are exceptions. Pawn shops for sure. They keep track of those IDs because they have to make sure things that are pawned aren’t stolen. So they check databases when acquiring goods to make sure. When you purchase a PS5 the receipt is for a specific PS5, for similar reasons. If something gets reported as stolen they can track it down.
Broadly speaking, if you’re worried about a company knowing exactly which PS5, or whatever you bought, I wouldn’t. Amazon and Ebay certainly have no clue. Amazon would have no way of knowing what item you purchased cause they don’t know which one in the warehouse will be packed. There’s no reason for them to keep track of things like that.
Of course, a wide variety of things can be purchased on these sites so there may be exceptions to this, such as vehicles. Don’t know if that’s still around on ebay but those would almost certainly be for specific VINs.
The fraud prevention department would like a word.
I’m not in a position to know exactly what the big retailers do, but chances are high that they scan the serial number RFID or bar code before shipping, in order to detect when someone returns a different unit.
Big-ticket items like PS5s and laptops have serial number barcodes on the outside of the box for that reason.
If you really don’t want it tracked for some reason, buy from a third party seller who, while they might record that info, isn’t going to share it with anyone and will probably lose the sticky note it was written on in a few weeks. Or go to a pawn shop and buy one in cash.
But if you’re going to use a PS5, aren’t you going to have to link a payment method for stuff like online services anyway?
I’d be surprised but perhaps my information is just out of date. They do need to make sure you return the correct model but typically that’s done by visually verifying what you return matches what was sold. This can be problematic which is why you sometimes here about people having returned bricks instead of the proper item at Walmart.
Though, a PS5 may have been a bad example because you do tend to reach certain price points were things differ. Like CPUs typically are kept track of individually, though GPUs often aren’t.