Video Games Sellers: Here Comes The Bombshell

Suppliers within the Gaming Industry, it's an important topic and one which you need to understand if you are selling Video Games.

Businessdictionary.com defines a Supplier as an:
“External entity that supplies relatively common, off the shelf, or standard goods or services.”

Meaning that a supplier doesn’t have to call itself a “wholesaler, distributor” or similar for you to use it as one. Your Supplier is whoever you buy items from that you’re selling. It can be a traditional wholesaler, Online Store (amazon, play.com etc) or even your local supermarket.

If you can buy something and re-sell it for a profit elsewhere then why not do it?
there’s no laws against it and alot of Sellers both on & offline already adopt this business model.

The advantage of using a Wholesaler of course is that you can buy in bulk.
For new or part time traders, investing in such large amounts of stock can be extremely risky and it's normally a better idea to build your business up slowly, learning what sells and what doesn't along the way.

Even if you do have a good knowledge of Games, it doesn't necessarily mean that you know what will sell at a profit for you.
If you sink all of your money into one big order at the beginning of your trading career then you had better get your selection spot on first time or you may be stuck with stock you can't sell and then what will you do?

Now Here’s The Bombshell!

Just because a Company describes themselves as a “Wholesale Supplier”, this doesn’t automatically mean they are the cheapest place for you to purchase your stock!

This is especially true in the Video Games Industry and here’s why:

Lets have a look at the Video Games Supply Pyramid Diagram above.
view full size version

We can immediately see that Publishers i.e. Sony & Microsoft etc are at the top of the Supply Chain.

Going down the left side, we have Distributors & Wholesalers, followed by middlemen (and possibly even more middlemen). The price of items will rise accordingly the further down the chain you go.

As they spend millions per year, Retailers like Play, HMV, Amazon etc. have accounts directly with the publishers and have access to the lowest suppliers (publishers won't deal direct with you until you're spending millions).

Distributors and Major Wholesalers also have accounts directly with the Publishers as they buy similar quantities to Play/Amazon etc. but instead of selling direct, they sell to smaller businesses who are now buying one step further down the line and therefore at a higher price than the big boys.

The middle men tend to be retailers that are reasonable in size and therefore getting better discounts from the wholesalers and distributors. As they have some buying power, they decide to offer trade accounts to smaller retailers that either aren't aware of the main wholesaler/distributor, can't get an account, too small etc. They're now buying two steps down the line getting even less competitive in price. The chain then goes on.

As you can see, these big online Retailers have the Power to offer prices to you which only the largest Wholesalers or Distributors could possibly match. But the difference being that you can expect to be buying stock in the thousands before those Distributors will even think of touching you!

This is why alot of Independent Sellers turn to online retailers to supply them with Games at prices they can make a profit with.
These online Retailing giants are constantly battling it out amongst themselves trying to get people through their virtual doors, pushing their prices down in order to improve their market share.
Because of this, their prices often drop below the current market value in the process and Traders take advantage of this by purchasing from them and re-selling.

It makes total sense!

• You can buy at wholesale equalling prices and even lower
• you can buy in quantities you are comfortable with
• their service and returns policies are usually great (afterall, they want to keep their customers coming back don’t they!)

Game Assassin was built to help independent sellers take advantage of this exact trend by enabling you to search for games which can be bought from online retailers and resold for a profit on ebay or amazon.