Buy and Sell Video Games for a Decent Profit

I stumbled upon this little known method to make money a while back when video games had been around long enough to start becoming collector’s items but not long enough to start a decline in their popularity.  The idea is to buy games for less and sell them for more.  It is much like the stock market in this aspect.  You buy and sell and hope to come out ahead.

In order to make money on video games, you need to know which ones are in demand on the internet.  The only way that you can make a consistent amount is to use the internet.  This way you will have an target audience that will never diminish.  You can sell some games to family or friends but you cannot do this consistently.  Good sites to look at selling your wares would be Amazon and Ebay.

Before you go out and buy up as many used video games (trying to make a profit on new ones would be idiocy), you should do your research first.  You will need to make a list of video games that are selling for decent prices online (at least $30) and try to find them around town.  Make sure that you find several examples of every game because if it is a fluke, you may lose money. 

Now that you have your list, you can go out to your local video game stores and start to purchase your inventory.  It can be hard to find rare video games, and how many games you buy initially will depend heavily on your bankroll.  Some privately owned video games stores will even haggle with so you can potentially increase your earnings there.  The reason that you can buy video games at the store for less than you can sell them online is because the games that the store buys are from customers.  They buy them at a hugely discounted price and they can afford to lower their selling price because of the little amount that they purchased it for.  Also the demand for that video game will be much less because any particular store will never have as many customers as Amazon or Ebay.

Now that you have purchased your games, you will need to post them online.  The best way to go about selling games initially is through Ebay.  Here you can set up a base and eventually you can host some of your bigger ticket items on Amazon.  Amazon will sell them for more money than Ebay to some of the less internet savvy folk out there.

When selling on Ebay, you want to be as specific as possible.  People aren’t very trustful (or trustworthy) anymore and you will need as much proof of the product you are selling as possible.  You should post as many pictures of the game as you can.  Pictures of the back of the disc as well as the front will help sell the item because your customers will know it is in good condition.  You should avoid posting that you bought it used because some of your potential buyers may try to find their own used copy and drive down your selling price.

Once you have gotten your technique down, you can make a couple hundred dollars a month just buy selling video games.  What you are offering to the customer is a service to find the video game.  You will have to do some work for this, but let’s face it, at least you have an excuse to go to the video game store.