Games Corner: The Community Exchange

You have games you’re done with, but how do you cycle them out? Selling online can be difficult and you often have to ship; selling to friends or local groups can lack the demand to your supply.

Enter the Community Exchange. The goal is to put your games in front of the eyeballs of the entire community. You can submit up to 5 games at a time, we put them on display in the store for everyone to see. You set the price (we can help suggest one if you like), the price is non-negotiable. When your game sells, you get 70% of the final price in store credit.

Some of the behind the scenes: we made the tough decision to suspend our Used Games section indefinitely after initially suspending it during COVID due to concerns about viral transmission. This was a difficult decision, as everyone really enjoyed the Used Game section, including us.

But from a business perspective, buying games was hard because you dont know when they’ll sell. Will it be a week? A month? A year? Even some of the best games ever would sit for long stints without finding a new home.

To help this, about six years ago we started pricing them lower in hopes of more turnover, but this meant we were offering less to the original owner. So someone would come in and sell us their games, and we would only offer 25% of the value of the game in return. So someone would sell us a game they’d initially bought for $40, and we’d give them $10.

Some folks still took this offer because it was better than the hassle of selling online. Furthermore, we also tried Swap Meets, but to make it lucrative for both sellers and buyers, you really want a critical mass and we never quite got to that place precisely.

With the Community Exchange, you retain ownership of your games. If you have some old Kickstarter that you know has a market, but shipping it would be a nightmare, bring it in! We’ll shrink-wrap it and put it out for 90 days. Do you want to slowly cull your stuff that doesn’t make it to the table? Bring in 5! We’ll take them.

So back to that original example, if you brought in that $40 game, you get 70% of the profit in-store credit — so you’d end up with $28 to spend in the store. You could grab a new, hot game, maybe some Magic: the Gathering, or even something someone else has in the Community Exchange! If something doesn’t sell, we’ll give it back — you can try again in another 60 days. That means everything you see in the Community Exchange is new (to the shelf). Things are rotating in and out all the time.

It has been a busy couple of weeks here at the shop, and we didn’t want to overwhelm everyone with emails and ads about one more thing — but the Community Exchange has been open now for a couple of weeks, and we already see people adding their games and buying games. And we think it is going to be a real hit.

Drop by and check it out! If you have any questions, drop by and ask an employee or shoot me an email here at the store: fun@pairadicegames.com.