The Game Assassin Blog

[VIDEO] How To Find Games You Can Re-Sell For a Profit Using Game Assassin

John_GameAssassin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:01:03 +0000

In this video, I go through the basic steps in using our Assassin Search tool to find games online which you can resell on ebay for a profit.

It explains exactly how in around 10 minutes you can find these games and build your own personal list for when you come to purchase stock for your own business.

Enjoy :)

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How do you get customers from ebay on to your own store?

John_GameAssassin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:01:59 +0000

Ebay is the world's biggest marketplace, it's were you will undoubtedly be able to present yourself to the largest consumer audience without spending thousands if not millions on advertising.

This kind of exposure comes at a price though, and that price is large profit reducing fees aswell as (in most cases) a high amount of competition.
So in order to push your business forward and increase profits while still getting this exposure, you need a way of getting customers out of ebay and onto your own online store were there is no other competition and you can price items higher. Plus as there are no ebay fees, this means bigger profits all round.

So how do you go about getting customers from ebay to your store, well here's a few ideas:

1. add a link into your 'about me' page
Let's get started with the really simple one, did you know that there's a page people can click on in your listing which you can use to add info about yourself and include adverts/links to your own store? It might not get you a huge amount of traffic but it's worth adding all the same.
About me page details

2. include an ebook with your item
This little concept works on 2 levels, lets say you're selling 'fifa' for the xbox, you could include a strategy guide as an ebook along with the sale. Not only will this make your listing that bit more attractive to potential customers but when they buy the item you can send them a link with the confirmation email that directs them to a page on your store were they can download it.
Make sure that they see all of your current best offers on that page to encourage them to buy other items direct from you.
You can buy all kinds of “e-guides” on ebay itself for a just a couple of pounds. There a tons on there at the moment regarding building your ultimate team on fifa so that would be ideal.

3. offer a discount voucher
When someone buys an item from you on ebay, send them a discount voucher for your online store. You could send it in an email but the most effective way would be as a physical leaflet for your store along with their ordered item. Make sure your leaflet looks professional and really sells your store.
you could even include a couple of your best prices on the leaflet, but as the game prices change so fast that would only be advisable if you have a high volume of customers to send leaflets out to or a printers who will do short run jobs for reasonable price.

No matter what concept you use, your main objective should always be to make customers aware of your store and to get into the habit of checking you out first when they are looking for their next purchase.

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Digital Distribution Is Killing It: What Does This Mean For Video Games Sellers?

John_GameAssassin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:08:09 +0000

There are 2 trends in the gaming media headlines at present, reports of the huge rises of sales in the digital gaming market (xbox live, steam, psn, facebook etc) and reports of the decline in high street “boxed games” market.

With publishers like EA making a push for sales in digital downloads and in-game content where does this leave the average independent games seller?

This issue has been on my mind for quite a while now as I've watched this area of the market continue to grow. The question is, if consumers stop buying boxed versions of games and opt instead for it's downloadable equivalent, how can us video games sellers get in on this?

Will we have no choice but to sell peripheral items such as headsets, chargers and cables or will there be a channel available for us to trade in the downloadable gaming market ourselves?
Game have struck a deal with sony to sell games from the playstation network but at the moment it is totally exclusive to them.

The only option that I can conceive at present is the trading of in-game content such as ultimate team players in fifa 12 or virtual money. We may turn into virtual gamesworkshop style stores selling weapons and other “cool” stuff which people can add to their characters in-game.

It's all up in the air at the moment and until Companies start releasing their actual digital sales figures, nobody knows just how big that side of things are compared to the physical media market.

What are your thoughts on what you think will happen in the near future for independent video games sellers?

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how to keep customers coming back for more

John_GameAssassin — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:32:35 +0000

There are something like a billion people on the internet today (well maybe not quite that many, I don't know the exact figures but you get the picture) and that means you have countless potential customers .
To the inexperienced seller this sounds like it would be pretty easy to get a load of new customers without much time, money or effort.
The problem is that with such a huge amount of customers also comes a lot of competition, so how do you persuade someone to keep buying from you rather than 'billy bobs bits and bobs' which is only ever one click of the mouse away and may be lower in price?

The price is one of the main thing that companies use to get those customers to make their first purchase with them, but once that first purchase is made, oh baby that's when the real business starts!

Did you know that it costs around 5 times as much to get new customers than it does to market to existing customers and get a sale, this means that most of your effort should be used on people who have already purchased from you. 80 percent of your effort to be precise!

If you're constantly working solely on getting new customers to buy from you, competing on price against all of those other sellers then you are making things so much harder for yourself and driving down your own prices to stay in line with everyone else.

Once you get a sale from a new customer, your first priority should be to provide a top rate service and that means first of all getting their purchase to them as quickly as possible.
Make sure you stay in touch with them every step of the way, so when the order is received thank them for it, when the item is dispatched you can let them know, you can even send them an email asking if everything was ok with the order when they received it.

This does 2 things, it makes your customer feel valued and it gives them an opportunity to respond to you and let you know about any issues that you need to address. If there was a problem you can fix it asap. Doing all of this can be pretty much automated with any email marketing software and is a powerful way of establishing your brand with them.

If your customer feels valued and is happy with the service they received from you then they will be primed for more orders in the future. What might have been a single order the first time round might turn into a multi purchase next time or even regular orders every month from then on. Get handful of those every month and you're on to a winner.

So now you have a list of customers on your books what can you do with this information?

You can keep in touch with them via email for starters, try to contact them every couple of weeks, let them know about any special offers you have going on at the moment or give them a discount voucher for your online store. You don't have to do a hard sell in every mail out, something like providing info on upcoming releases or reviews of the latest titles (if you're in the gaming industry) will make opening your mail a joy for your customers.

If your in-box is anything like mine then you will probably receive quite a few mail-outs from companies every week so it's easy to get lost in the crowd if you don't make your email heading stand out, so work on this, try not to make it sound spammy and engage with your customer.

If you want to really stand out, you could send physical mail out to your customers, that's right, I'm talking about actual paper through the post. In this techno crazy world it might sound like a step backwards but just think how much more likely someone is to read your message if it comes through their letter box and once they've read it, if they're interested then chances are it will still be laying around the house in weeks if not months time and everytime they see it they will be reminded of you. So when it comes time to buy their next batch of games you can bet that they will come and visit your site first.

Getting people to make that first purchase is just the start and you shouldn't concentrate on that as your main source of income, being able to get people to keep coming back to you, on your own online store away from the crazyness of ebay is when you'll start to make your biggest profits and begin to build your brand for real.

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New Shopping Trend Could Mean the Biggest Rise Ever For Online Stores

John_GameAssassin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:35:42 +0000

After reading this article on tamebay 'is mobile shopping coming of age' it's got me thinking, with this recent trend of customers checking for the cheapest online price while standing in a shop, could a new offline business model for general high street stores see their online counterparts become the main suppliers to their customers? It might sound abit crazy but just hear me out...

The idea goes like this,
*using my best Movie Trailer Voice*
In the near future,
People have stopped purchasing in-store,
High street sales have plummeted,
Consumers now use hand held devices to find the cheapest price online after testing items out in-store,
Something needs to be done in order to save the high street,
This year one man will change everything... *ahem* you get the idea :)

If you're the owner of a massive Comet style store containing thousands of items, customers can walk around, physically touching the items and even testing them out (the one thing which the internet can't do!). Then rather than going to the till to pay for the item they use an in store computer / app to select a Company to have full-fill the order for them, pay and leave.
The shop takes a cut of the sale (affiliate style) and the chosen online store delivers it to your address.

This takes advantage of the rising trend of people checking online prices in-store then leaving without buying anything. I think as smart phones become quicker and easier to use while on the move we will see this trend continue to rise while in-store sales fall. So this new way of shopping could re-address the balance and give brick and mortar stores a reason for being there in the first place.

The downside of this is that, sometimes (especially when on your last minute Christmas dash) you want to take the item home there and then. So keeping some physical stock on-site could still be an option for these stores but the shopper you would be paying a higher price for the convenience of the service.

This method would dramatically bring down the cost of running these brick and mortar stores which as we have seen recently with the quick demise of best buy in the UK can only be a good thing.

This could also bring about a change of focus on the shopping experience itself into a more relaxed apple style store were shoppers are “hanging out”, trying out the latest products or watching in-store demo’s rather than the current style of get in, pay for your item and get out.

If your thinking that this would never work because the brick and mortar stores would be losing out only taking a smaller affiliate sized sale, I'm basing this in a world were a large percentage of shoppers are walking into a store, looking around and leaving without buying anything as they have just purchased their items online, on your own expensive premises. A smaller percentage of something is a lot better than a large percentage of nothing.

What do you think? Don't agree then let's hear your visions of future shopping

credit - image by anasrist

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Argh! I can't sell my stock, what am I going to do?

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:14:13 +0000

We've all done it, it's a fact of business, you've bought in some stock but for some reason there's a few items which you just can't seem to sell no matter what you do. Maybe you need to sell them in order to free up enough cash to buy in your next order so freeing that money up is essential to move forward.

So what do you do, do you sit on this poorly performing stock and hope that it sells one day? Hell no!

If you have tried to sell something on ebay or amazon a couple of times without success, don't just give up, there's always another way.

Here's some ideas about how you can easily sell them and get back at least a portion of your cash at the same time.

One of my favourite methods which I touched on in how to get a shed load of customers is to use 99p auctions on ebay. Anybody out there who is actively looking to purchase the specific title that you are selling will watch your auction like a hawk and will most likely make a bid if the price is right, so you're pretty much guaranteed a sale there and you may get a surprise of how much it ends up selling for.

Another way would be to use a trade in service that places like cex, game & music magpie offer. It's a quick and easy way to get some money back from your unmovable stock (not a huge amount but still something) or even trade it in for a game which you know you can sell and get a piece of your money back that way. If you're going to do this, I'd suggest that you shop around and see who can offer you the best deal. Any large town centre will have at least afew options for trading in.

If you have a number of titles that you need to get rid of, why not offer them as a bulk purchase to sellers on business forums such as thewholesaleforums or even on ebay in it's wholesale and job lots category.

Something I see sellers do is if they are offering say 5 games as a bulk buy, include 1 or 2 top titles (to get the buyer interested) , maybe an average title and the rest are old or poorly rated ones. It makes the deal look better and will push up the final price.
People often keep an eye on classified sites like gumtree for bargains which they can resell so you could offer a bulk deal like this on there too but be aware that transactions usually take place face to face rather than online via paypal.

I hope that this has given you some inspiration and will help you push on with your business if the time ever comes that you're stuck with stock.

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How to get a shed load of new customers without paying for advertising

John_GameAssassin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:41:17 +0000

Advertising is all well and good but it can cost you a lot of money, sometimes without much return. For the average new online trader, your budget can be tight so you need ways of attracting new customers/making them aware of you and gaining trust.
How are you going to go about doing all that without spending thousands on advertising and marketing, well here's a couple of ebay based ideas to get you going:

The new release method
This method involves using the latest hot releases. Yes I know I always say that there's no money in new releases but this is how you can use them to help your business.

When the big stores are running there usual price war promotions on the latest big release, there's usually a point where one store goes abit loopy and drops the price stupidly low (you could use the watching feature to keep an eye on these specific games).

Once the price drops, buy as many as you can there and then, don't worry about buying too many as you'll have no trouble selling them on due to their current high demand.
Once you have a nice pile ready, work out your break even price (including all costs) and sell them at this price, chances are that you will be one of the cheapest out there on ebay so they will easily sell all day long.

Make sure you provide a speedy/quality service and you will have load of new customers on your books who you know are actively buying games, know you and have already gained some trust for the future.

Once you have heap of customer details, keep in touch with them at regular intervals via email or through the post your latest deals (which will have a good profit margin for you). If you have your own online store then you can direct them straight there and eliminate ebay fees.

The 99p Auction Method
This might seem abit mad but I've used it a number times and it honestly works.
What you are trying to do here is get as many people onto your ebay listings as possible. The way to do this is by setting a number of your items at a 99p auction start. I would usually set it for a duration of 3 – 5 days.

This is will get a lot of eye balls onto your listing and if they see this amazing deal then the chances are that they will scan through the rest of your items to see what else you have.
Big businesses use a similar method all of the time, y'know when you see things like “Big Sale” then one lead item like “buy modern warfare 3 for just £22 plus lots more” if you look at what else they have “on sale”, most of the time these other sale items aren't any better than what you find on a regular day elsewhere but that lead item has already got a lot of buyers onto their site or through their doors.

Plus with this 99p auction method, your item will often sell for as much as you would have set the buy it now price for anyway and sometimes even higher (if your lucky).

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Video Games Sellers: Here Comes The Bombshell

John_GameAssassin — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:05:16 +0000

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.

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Why In The Hell Should You Sell Video Games?

John_GameAssassin — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:23:58 +0000

Today I want to help answer this important question for you, why exactly should you sell video games?

If you look around the internet these days on various business forums, everybody is saying that the Video Games Market is saturated! So why on Earth would you want to run a business selling them?

Well, the main reason you are probably interested in this market to begin with is because you already enjoy playing video games. This is not a bad thing, infact its quite a wonderful decision, as business types will always advise you to pick a market you are interested in.
So if you already love the product that you are looking to sell, you are part of the way there to answering this question, but simply being fond of something doesn't make it a good business opportunity...

Your own personal preferences aside, Video Games are a Multi-Billion Pound Industry.
That's right, we are talking Billions here and I'm sure just like me, you would love your own little slice of that!
As well as that, it's one of the most in-demand markets to be in online, meaning that if done right, you can expect to shift alot of stock, day in day out.

High demand items do however usually mean alot of competition.
This is of course true for Video Games, but any Seller with a well thought out Strategy, professional image but most of all, a quality service can pretty much always expect to do well.

The Facts of Selling Games Online

So that you have a clear understanding of what to expect, I want to give you some real world facts about selling games.

First of all, if you're selling games online then you will quickly realise that games never sell for their recommended retail price, this very rarely happens, even on the latest releases.

From my own experience, I tend to look for Games which I can expect to put at least 30% markup on. After taking away things like ebay & paypal fees I can expect to walk away with a minimum of 18% clean profit, which isn’t too bad at all.

Plus if things do go wrong and I need to drop the price, I still have a nice little cash safety net so that I’m not losing money, instead just making abit less than expected, which is no big deal.

The online marketplace can be an unpredictable beast so sometimes games will sell for less than expected where as others will sell for alot higher, it does all usually balance itself out in the long run, so don't panic if you find that you can't shift a title without dropping your price a little.

Selling Games is of course about selling multiple amounts, if you think you can sell just one or two items every couple of days and live off it then you'll need to think again.

Providing a quality service and well designed listings full of information that the buyer wants to know will mean that you are able to sell your games way above the lowest priced sellers, giving you bigger profit margins to play with.

About New Releases: Something you must know!

Although selling the latest releases can bring a swarm of eager buyers to your e-store's door, the truth is that margins are so tight with them that there's virtually no money to be made.

The real money is being made in titles that have been out for afew months. These are where the profit margins are bigger and the competition can be alot less fierce.

New Releases do still have their use in your Business though...
Think of selling New Releases on ebay as a way of advertising yourself to new potential customers (without having to pay for advertising).
Also, when they've bought from you the first time, if you provided a good service then chances are that they will come back to you in future. Getting that first sale is hugely important but repeat business can make or break you. It's a long term strategy so you can't expect overnight results, think of it as building your brand.

Plus once you have a customer's details, you can advertise to them for free as often as you like via email or even "the old fashioned way" by sending leaflets through the post. Just don't flood your customers with constant messages or you run the risk of them unsubscribing from your mailing list!

If you love Gaming then getting into selling Video Games online can be a great market to start and run your own business in. As Games are relatively low cost items, it's an ideal Market for new & part time sellers to jump into with little risk.

With the high demand for them, if you get your decisions right then you can turnover a huge amount of money per day.

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