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[Seraphis Cain]

Anyone know how this works? Case in point: There's a local game store here (actually a small chain, three stores in the tri-county area) who accepts trade-ins, and actually give very good trade-in credit ($35 for Batman AA only a couple months ago, far better than a nationwide chain would give). They have a barcode-scanning system in place, so all they have to do is scan the game and their computer gives them the trade-in value.

I guess what I want to know here is, are there databases that indie game stores can use for this purpose? Something related to Amazon's used game prices perhaps? Anyone here with indie game store experience know?

 

[AceBandage]

I made a topic on this a week ago.
Basically, eBay.
Whatever the BIN price is, is usually what they'll sell it for (regardless of condition).
So they'll buy it at maybe half that price.

 

[Gomu Gomu]

edit: nm.

 

[Dr. Zoidberg]

I also have a local Mom n' Pop that I trade in at that gives much better credit than the chain stores. I'm not sure where they look for the trade-in values, but they have some kind of program or spreadsheet on a computer they reference. I've always been pleased with what they give me, even on old stuff like 8-Bit NES games and what not.

 

[TriniTrin]

One by my house doesnt scan trade ins, they input it into their computer database manually. Im pretty sure they use a combination between all the public data they can find for similar trade-ins (GS,Amazon,ect) and how many units they have in stock to dictate trade in value. Once a friend of mine wanted to trade GTA4 and they wouldnt take it because they had so many.:lol

 

[Seraphis Cain]

Hmm...the eBay thing makes a lot of sense. The store here usually has very odd prices for things, and they can vary between the same product (for instance, they might have two copies of Tekken 6 in stock, one for $27.56 and one for $26.82). Perhaps they go off some sort of current average price?

(Also off-topic, one thing that annoys me about this store is that they NEVER re-price anything. At one point they had a copy of X-Blades for PS3 that I was morbidly curious about, but it was $35 used, because it had been traded in quite a while ago. Fuck all that, X-Blades is like $15 new now and that's STILL too expensive. :lol )

 

[Sanic]

Probably a combination of all kinds of public data.

With the indie store near me, for anything last gen or older, he has a huge excel spreadsheet with trade-in values. Anything current gen, he hops onto Gamestop's website and determines a trade-in value based how much GS is selling the game for used :lol

 

[RyanDG]

I used to work at an indy game store as an assistant manager. My job was to create the databases for the trade in values. Basically what I had to do is create an excel spreadsheet with every game title (domestically) that came out for a given system -- this was tied to our scan system via our computers. On that spreadsheet I had tracking in place to follow Ebay pricing, Gamestop pricing, and Amazon pricing. I would take the averages of these and use it for the median pricing for the game. Following this - I would track the game on a seperate spreadsheet with the last 12 months worth of online pricing (median between the sites). Games that had a signficant drop were color coded in red, significant increases in green. If a game was trending up, I would check the pricing again the following month. If a game was trending down, I would do the same. If the game was relatively the same, I would check it again in 3 months. Once a game's value got to a certain 'level' I would stop checking it altogether unless some other circumstances came up. I then used this pricing to determine roughly what we could sell a game for and what we could reasonably buy a game for (with either cash or credit). It was a long process (took me a bout a week each month), but once I got it all set up for them it worked out extremely well, especially since pricing from Gamestop and Amazon essentially auto-pooled itself. I fiddled with the numbers a bit in the cases of games that Gamestop or Amazon did not stock or undervalued for our market, but it was a good backbone for what I did. After the changes I made to the syste were in place we had to go retag everything with changes in values, etc.