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.