business idea: video game bartering

Initial idea for gamers barter service

Video gaming is an annual, multi-billion dollar industry. Gamers have an insatiable appetite for newer and more interesting games. The problem is, how to satisfy that voracious need on limited budgets. Games are increasingly expensive to purchase and harder to pirate. Once a game is played and finished interest is lost and the game essentially becomes a piece of junk.

An online bartering service would allow gamers to exchange new and used games and equipment at very little cost. Such a service would facilitate the barter transactions and offer insurance that the terms of barter are met and enforced. Users would ship barter items to a central repository for inspection and repackaging. This would ensure a fair and equitable exchange. BRENT: This wouldn't work, way too much over head for company to deal with thousands of items and the user has to pay postal twice, once to the repository and once more to the final recipient.

A better system would involve each user deal directly with each other and the implementation of a rating system similar to that used by ebay. Self-enforcement, a poor rating from other users would indicate an untrustworthy user.

BRENT: In terms of complexity, a simple 'one to one' barter service could be set up relatively easily. From there a much more complex search matrix would be necessary for more efficient pairing of users and barter items. E.g. a user has items available for barter and a list of items that he/she would like to barter for. The system search capability should be able to find another user with the same or similar barter status. If it can't find any matches the system should be intelligent enough to find alternatives such that the needs of the user can still be met in a round about manner. It may require that the user needs to trade with a third user to acquire that wanted from the first user, etc. This triangulated transaction would be facilitated as a single transaction. An architecture like this would require a vast amount of work.

This service would be free to attract initial customers and as the user base grows, banner ads would generate income.

Service can also facilitate cash or credit card purchases instead of bartering and would mean the implementation of a paypal/verotel style billing solution with SSL encryption. BRENT: This is easy to set up.

While initially an idea to service the gaming market this is conceptually adaptable to any market.

Craigslist offers a form of barter service in the guise of an online classified page. The difference between Craigslist and a dedicated bartering service is that the bartering service would be far more user friendly and purpose built for bartering. Users will be attracted by it's ease of use and more powerful search and matching engine.

COMPETITION: This is not a new idea, the only thing that I came up with while doing a quick google search is barterfest.com and u-exchange.com. There are other barter sites but they seem to be more business to business type bartering and their web pages tend to look uber corporate. In order to out compete sites such as barterfest, we would need to make the service much more usable and maybe target a specific market such as video games. A more extensive search for available services out there needs to be done.

There does not seem to be a single definitive source for games bartering. One can visit many of the infinite number of gaming forums and online message boards out there and find many users bartering, but there is no one-stop source for the exclusive bartering of games. Perhaps by targeting the video game market, it would give an edge over the more generic bartering sites which don't seem to carry much gaming content.

Some barter sites, such as canadianbartersystem.com converts goods and services into a credit system that can then be exchanged.

Many bartering networks that deal in business to business bartering require a paid membership.

A successful franchise would then be open to being acquired by a larger game portal such as IGN or gamespot.com.