Slimebeast said:
neerdowell said:
There's much less risk that way. All you end up losing in the long run is your time. Plus it makes for a much more agile business model that can shift to meet future needs. Furthermore, it offsets some of the leg work to the ones seeking the service.
There are still risks involved I'm sure, which I'll likely find out. This will be my first venture into my own business.
It kind of started recently when I started working for store credit at a local used game store. My hope was that i could work for enough store credit to buy items and sell them back at a reasonable enough price online to make it worth my while as a job (I have other reasons why I didn't want to pursue an actual job).
I quickly discovered how difficult it is to get a reasonable price even when you're getting your products free, let alone when you are buying them even wholesale. Furthermore, I talked to the owner of the store and found out he was only 26 and started his store at the age of 21. He now has two local stores in only five years and the largest selection in town.
So I thought to myself; if he can do it at 21, I can do it at 26. From there, I started considering my own unique skill set and how I would go about it and I decided on an online approach (since I majored in computer science). I also thought about the general direction that the market is heading. With digital distribution taking a larger share of the physical market I decided that whatever idea I came up with had to be flexible enough to meet the changing demands and not risk falling flat on its face if the used market dies out in the next five to ten years.
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Interesting!
Your work at that used game store, was it cleric work? But you didn't get paid in cash, you got paid in games (store credits)?
The bold: what do you mean it was difficult? Difficult to get a good price when you sell individual games at Craigslist or Ebay, or?
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The work mostly consists of wrapping cords, organizing, and cleaning. The store takes in such a large volume of items (they sell games, movies, cds, retro systems, etc) that they have difficulty keeping up with it all.
As far as the difficulty in getting a decent price there is simply too much competition. Many sellers on ebay and amazon are selling thousands of items and relying on quantity to make a living. This means they drive the price really low, which is great for consumers but horrible for anyone selling only a few items. This is compounded when you consider seller fees from amazon and ebay.
A game that you might find in a used game store for $15 might go for $7-10 online. From that, amazon or ebay will take roughly $3 in seller fees. You are left with $4-6 for the sale, which means to make a reasonable profit you would have had to acquired the game initially for $2 dollars. That's simply unreasonable.
There are tricks of course, like knowing which games will sell better and how to find them cheaper; however, largely the amount of time and effort involved is disproportional to the reward. That is a trend I ultimately hope to reverse if only a little.
