Apple's iPad 2 tablets have been on the market for quite some time now but the eager consumers are hard pressed to find them in any kind of retail store. On Apple's US online store, the delay between ordering and shipping presently stands at three to four weeks. But all this doesn’t mean that you just can’t get your hands on it as long as you’re willing to fork out more cash.
One of the most popular sources to find an iPad 2 is sites like eBay. For an iPad 2 order you may have to pay up to $406 over the retail price for the most expensive 64-gigabyte version, which retails for $829.
Data released by eBay showed that the average selling price of a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad 2 has been $697, $198 over Apple's retail price. This means resellers are getting whooping 40 per cent profit.
Similarly, the most expensive 64GB iPad 2 is also proving to be more lucrative for resellers. The average auction price of the 64GB Wi-Fi model has reached $963, or 53 per cent above retail, while the 64GB Wi-Fi/3G iPad 2 averaged $1,235, 49 per cent higher than the list price of $829.
Apple's iPad 2 remains in very short supply in the US and in more than two dozen other countries.
In stores the iPad 2 is available between $499 and $699 for the Wi-Fi model, and between $629 and $829 for the Wi-Fi/3G version of the tablet.
According to eBay, 65 per cent of the consumers buying iPad 2 from resellers are US citizens, which is a dramatic reversal from the 35 per cent of eBay’s iPad sales in the US last year.
After the US, the country with the largest number of imported iPads is Russia, with Canada a close second. These countries are followed by Hong Kong, Japan, the UK, France and Poland. Russia has received 500 iPad 2s, compared with 215 of the original device during the same time in 2010. But one of the big droppers was Australia, which went from 317 units in last year's iPad to 110 with the new model.
The statistics released by eBay throws up another interesting fact which says 30 per ent of iPad 2s bought on the site were the 16GB WiFi-only model with the top of the line 64GB 3G version coming second with 23 per cent. It means people are either looking for the cheapest or very best iPad 2, but nothing in-between.
