I'm thinking about buying lots of loose "as-is" disc based games, buffing them and then reselling them on Vizzed and/or Ebay as a way to earn side income not only for me but for the site itself and I was wondering how many of you would be interested in this or if any of you have experience with buffing games.
Basically this process for me would be a little time consuming but could be automated. The process can also be broken down into 3 main steps (which I'll explain below) and would of course require some money to invest before I could start doing this (but I'll be selling games for my Dad soon and him and I are splitting the profits).
1. Finding the loose game lots. The bigger the lot, the more you save but you save even more when someone sells the game "as-is". This basically means that he doesn't know what works and what doesn't. In most of the cases, the games that don't work can be made to work (which I'll go over in step 2). I'd probably try and focus on lots where the average game comes out to be less than $1 a piece (as seen
here and
here) so that my profit margin is better and also so the time invested pays off.
2. Buffing the games. There are lots of devices out there that let you repair scratched game discs but the best one I could find (for the price anyway) was
JFJ Easy Pro. It's not the quickest solution (quicker solutions cost a lot more) but it's a cheaper solution at around $130 (with the average game costing 15-20 cents to repair based on required supplies). Sounds like it takes about 2-5 minutes per a repair but it does an amazing job and makes the games look near new as you can see
here.
3. Shipping the games. Since the games would be loose and since these are disc games, the quickest and most cost efficient ways to ship the games would be simply placing them in a
Cardboard Mailer, print the shipping label on the mailer, place the stamps on it and simply walk down to my mailbox and send them out. When I sell any other game, I have to purchase more expensive shipping material, the shipping cost is a lot higher and I have to make many trips to the post office. With this method, total shipping and handling (between the stamps, ink, and mailers), it'd probably only come out to be around $1 compared to $3-4 for games that are in a case.
I'd probably do any games ranging from PlayStation to the Xbox One and every system in between. Whatever I would be able to get my hands on at a great discount I'd probably do. I could also potentially sell games for
Viz but since that doesn't help me out financially, I'd probably have high
Viz prices and possibly even make it available to those who have donated.
EDIT: Games are usually far cheaper when they're loose so a lot of these games would be cheap and affordable. For the more expensive games though, I could potentially add an option to "rent" the games similar to Gamefly. For the potential rental idea, you'd get the loose game in the mail, the stamps inside (required for sending it back) and also the shipping label (and would just re-use the mailer). To avoid myself getting scammed, what I think I'd do is just charge the user the full price of the game and when they send it back, I give them their money back (minus the rental cost).
So what do you guys think of this idea? Would anyone buy any games if I were to do this?