Hot damn, you can trade your old crappy video games in to Amazon now and get Amazon gift cards dropped into your account. As someone who buys a lot of crap from Amazon.com, I can best describe my feelings about this as “excited” and “happy”, among others.
Trade-in values appear to be relatively fair, especially for newer games. The Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty: World at War, for instance, sells new for $49.99 and carries a trade-in value of $26.50. To get everything kick started, if you trade in games between now and March 19th, you’ll get a 10% coupon code for any single video game or accessory as well.
Video Games Trade-In [Amazon.com via Joystiq]
Nice idea…i’m sure video game companies are none too thrilled though, seeing how they feel about used games selling at EB and related places.
Cool, finally a Game Stop buster (who’s trade in prices are totally retarded).
Yeah, how are Amazon’s trade-in values compared to GameStop? I haven’t been to a GameStop in a while but the last time I was there I remember thinking the trade-in pricing seemed too low.
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 know how that story played out.
Though buyback sites have been around since 1996/97 (with the debut of SecondSpin) 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 ecommerce segment will wake up and challenge stores (who trade) like ecommerce did with brick and mortar for the last 10+ years.
Disclosure – Buybak.com provides a buyback software platform as a service for online retailers.
Its about time.
MP3’s, VOD, Game Downloads and now game trade-ins. And the Kindle too – Amazon is really expanding into everything.