Kaufland enters PlayStation 5 distribution (update)

With Kaufland.de, Sony Interactive is opening another online sales channel for the chronically sold-out PlayStation 5 game console.

Update from April 7, 2022: The PlayStation 5 with drive, which is listed yesterday and also this Thursday in the Kaufland online shop, is said to cost exactly €1,052.37 – a surcharge of more than 100 percent compared to the list price of €499. Anyway: “Free Shipping”.

Seller: ‘Kaufland’ – respectively the e-commerce division SDL Alpha Sixte GmbH based in Neckarsulm.

How did this enormous price come about? Upon request, Kaufland Corporate Communications will inform you that “Already sold some PS5 bundles to our customers at RRP price” and expects more deliveries in the future. Specifically, PS5 bundles at the manufacturer’s RRP from Kaufland would soon be offered again. “For this offer we are supplied directly by Sony.”

The procedure is different for PS5 ‘direct offers’, for which Kaufland on “sometimes different sources of supply” falls back. “Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee an RRP price for all offers. Due to the high demand, we have currently decided to offer these items anyway and thus offer our customers the opportunity to get one of the coveted PS5.

Translated: Kaufland relies on a kind of mixed calculation – On the one hand, PS5 bundles supplied by Sony, which are sold at recommended retail prices. In addition, Kaufland also offers the console at significantly inflated tariffs. Incidentally, this is not illegal – the criteria for “usury” do not apply to game consoles.

Message from April 1, 2022: Retailers on the Kaufland.de online marketplace are asking €800, €850, €900 and more for a factory-fresh PlayStation 5. The prices are 70 to 80 percent higher than Sony’s recommended retail price of €499 for the Blu-Ray model. In the past few days, however, readers have also contacted the editors for the first time, including PS5 bundles via kaufland.de Horizon: Forbidden West could buy for 579 €.

What we initially thought was a misunderstanding took a surprising turn.

To the background: The Kaufland parent company – the Schwarz Group based in Neckarsulm, which also includes Lidl – took over the real.de platform in October 2020 and then integrated it into kaufland.de. According to the company, the portal is one of the largest and fastest growing online marketplaces with more than 30 million offers from more than 7,000 dealers. The website thus competes with the Amazon Marketplace* as well as the immediate purchase on Ebay.

Kaufland is now also entering with its own “shop in the shop” and sells a selected non-food range such as garden furniture, laptops, e-bikes, televisions, refrigerators and whirlpools. The portfolio also includes console games and accessories such as controllers, headsets, etc. for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

When asked by GamesWirtschaft, Kaufland stated: “When expanding our range, we are primarily guided by customer demand. This is currently very high on the Playstation 5. We are therefore pleased about a cooperation with Sony and have already been able to sell some PS5 bundles including the game Horizon: Forbidden West to our customers at a recommended retail price of 579 euros.”

In the future, too, we want to offer customers the opportunity “to purchase the coveted console online directly from Kaufland”. Since the demand is currently higher than the available goods, Kaufland and Sony Interactive are working “working flat out on a solution”. The company recommends that customers visit Kaufland.de regularly.

Tip: Make sure that the seller is actually “Kaufland” – in all other cases the sales price will be significantly higher than the RRP.

Even a year and a half after its market launch, the PlayStation 5 is only available sporadically and only for a short time – even large suppliers such as Amazon, MediaMarkt/Saturn or Otto are at best supplied at intervals of several weeks. In the PS5 ticker, GamesWirtschaft documents the availability of the console in German retail from Monday to Friday.