Proving once more that Amazon wants to be your “go to” store for everything, they are now accepting trade-ins on used video games.
In an unexpected turn of events, Amazon has opened up a video game trade-in store where you can trade in your used games for Amazon gift cards. You simply tell them what games you have to trade-in, they tell you a total value, give you a pre-paid mailing label for you to send them in, and once they receive them you will get an Amazon gift card that you may use on any products you want.
What they will do with the games is a mystery as Adam Ostrow of Mashable accurately pointed out, Amazon does not currently have a used video game store. Perhaps they will be opening one, or are they selling them to other retailers? It is anyone’s guess at this point.
Currently you can trade-in games for the following systems.
- Microsoft Xbox
- Microsoft Xbox 360
- Nintendo DS
- Nintendo Game Boy Advance
- Nintendo GameCube
- Sony Playstation 2
- Sony Playstation 3
- Sony PSP
- Nintendo Wii
While you might get more money selling them on your own through eBay or Amazon’s used option, this removes a lot of work and headaches for you. Certainly this is a new option for a lot of people with growing video game collections.
Steve_Bonneau
March 7th, 2009 at 4:47 pm #
To date there hasn't been anyone the size of Amazon to offer this type of service to consumers – I believe Amazon will iterate their offering (as well as other successful buyback sites) to add more benefits and successfully differentiate from Gamestop’s in-store trading. Gamestop has recently said that online trading will fail. This is like Blockbuster saying that Netflix will fail because why would people want to receive new movies in the mail rather than go to their local Blockbuster store – we now know how that story line has played out.
Though buyback sites have been around since 1996/97 (with the debut of SecondSpin.com) this category of ecommerce (consumer to business) has been a sleeping giant. No one with any significant resources to date has offered consumers the type of service that really compels consumers to trade online in the numbers consumers do with online ecommerce or rental of movies through Netflix type services. With Amazon’s entry this sleeping giant of an online commerce segment will wake up and challenge brick and mortar stores (who trade) like ecommerce did with brick and mortar for the last 10+ years. Game on!
Disclosure – Buybak.com provides a buyback software platform as a service for online retailers.