This article totally isn’t out a day late, you can be sure of that. :) True talk though, thank you all for basically never raising an eyebrow when article scheduling misses the planned dates/times. Around 99% of the time it’s because of scheduling conflicts with my wife’s work and custody of my kids. I tend to work ahead so articles can come out on time regardless, but sometimes that window moves around as unexpected obligations crop up or issues need to get fixed.
I got a strongly favorable reaction to last week’s mostly-paid-exclusive article, Video Game Console System Buying Parameters, but only from a small portion of my readership. I am not surprised it worked out that way. By far most of my readership are owners or operators of TCG-focused stores, and this is reflected in that being the lion’s share of LGSNI content. But I am still a fervent believer that the used video game trade is a modelable, duplicable, process-masterable category for LGSes to be in, with a nice deep moat against new disruptive competitors (since it takes a while to amass a broad and deep inventory). So I want to continue to point my readers toward best practices in the video game category whenever feasible, and to encourage LGSes to explore possibly entering the video game resale market if and when they are comfortable that their business is well-situated to try it.
It’s common as you build a video game resale book-of-business to get frustrated and feel like it’s a money sink and is going nowhere. Most of the early process is like that, and it can take the first year or more. When you’re new to the scene, you’re still calibrating your cash reserve strats, you’re still trying to get the word out for people to clean out their closets and bring it all in, and you’re still trying to master your buying. Meanwhile, all the hardest-edged sharps in the collector community smell fresh new blood and are falling over themselves to dupe you into buying their mistakes off them and overpaying to boot. Glitchy media, banned systems, drifty controllers, counterfeit carts, you name it. Complete and total malicious dishonesty.
It’s not that different from dealing in Magic, if you think about it. Most of your sellers aren’t angel arrivals bringing you their departed Uncle Rich’s dual land collection and willing to take ratio. Most of them are lifers, backpack dealers, and/or grinders constantly iterating until they can discover the next new way to pry a dollar off of you without giving value for it. You get past that by learning to filter for it and then graduating to higher-value higher-trust transactions.
The above Sega CD collection landed in our laps at the tail end of the crypto boom, February 2022. It’s not all rares or grails; there’s a mix of common and uncommon stuff in there, but for systems like Sega CD, mostly the product in the wild just doesn’t circulate, so this kind of collection buy was going to really help my showcase look respectable for a long time to come as it gradually trickle-sold out.
I paid a ratio on market rates at the time, which was a lot. These days the resale would be lower, but I’m still not upside-down on it because none of this stuff has gotten any more common. Lunar TSS CIB was around $210 at the time and is around $175 today. I probably offered $155-$160 on it at the time. Generous and definitely enough to please the seller, but not so much that I’d be ankled if the market dipped. I probably allocated $5-$6 to Jurassic Park CIB, since I had several in stock already, but it’s an easy sale at $19.99-$22.99 then and now, and the seller was fine with it in the context of the overall entire-collection offer. Even if you don’t deal in video games you can probably see that these are healthy, sustainable numbers for all involved, including the customer who sold to us.
To get to where batches like this would walk in the door to be sold to us, we had to have our processes well-polished (not perfect, but improving). We had to have great marketing that kept getting the word out that if you had a video game collection sitting in your closet, we are buyers and we have cash for you, no hassles. The store had to look good: clean, bright, welcoming, trustable. The staff had to be friendly and approachable. The buy process had to be fast but accurate, and also competitive. And we had to do all those things every day for years until collections like this started finding their way to us. But once they did, it was like the dam broke and the river flowed ever after.
For any used product category, most of those general principles will also apply. It’s not just a question of doing it right one time, but of figuring out a framework for your business to be doing it right over and over, for long enough that people find out, remember, and/or get recommended that they should be coming to you to cash out their collectible goods. There’s a lot of finesse needed so that the sharps, lifers, garage dealers, etc, don’t get under your skin and making sure you leave no good openings for them to invent a nasty story about you that goes viral, but it’s achievable and thankfully the public has five minutes of RAM these days and then everything goes right down the memory hole for the most part.
Whatever categories you try to resell used merch in, whether that’s cards, video games, vintage toys, comics, or anything else, I wish you the best of luck in rising above the undertow and becoming the Town Treasure Trove, to the eternal frustration of the area grifters who hate the fact that you won’t subsidize their hobby.
See you again in a couple days!