I think I should start selling Nintendo Wii

Yep, if you can get hold of them sell! nintendo even said a few months back they wont be able to deliver enough for christmas.

The Wii has been hard to get since it came out, regardless of the time of year. It's the only video game I've seen where the consoles are hardly ever in stock anywhere. Amazon had some the other day but I'm sure they are gone now. I only knew from following amazondeals on Twitter.

I wonder how many more would have been sold if people could just buy one when they want.

My point is they are overdoing the scarcity, when even during slower periods of the year, the consoles are so hard to find. If people can't buy the console, they won't buy all the games and other add-ons, which for most owners would add up to a lot more money than the console.

If you use scarcity to the point where many customers will just give up and buy a readily-available competing product, what is smart about that?

Usually consoles are only scarce the first few months, then they are easy to find. If it wasn't a few days before Christmas, I could easily find an Xbox or PS3 in stock.

The console isn't high priced compared to its competitors- $249 is the normal price in stores.

DeBeers is different since they basically have a monopoly, and men aren't coerced into spending 2 months' salary on a video game.

As to whether or not you should start selling the Wii...if the supply is limited, then you will have a hard time selling very many. Thus, it probably wouldn't be worth it.

It's a good niche to get into in a very limited way. It's also a little late to look for quick profits THIS YEAR. Making a lot of money being the middle-man for gaming consoles depends on either doing monster volume or getting a great mark-up. These can both be done in the days leading up to Christmas but you should be looking to build up your stock in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.

I know a guy who has had free Christmases for about 5 years by just taking a look at what's going to be hot this Christmas (he's taking this look around October/early November). Last year, he bought 20 Xbox 360's over the course of a couple of months and got more than double his money back selling them to people in the rush at Christmas. All he had to do was keep his finger on the pulse on the stores in the area and pre-order as many as they would allow. Every year, there's some toy that's going to be fought over at Christmas. It's generally no surprise because (as others have stated) the companies want to create this scarcity to give their product a higher perceived value.

I knew a guy who would do this same thing with Harley Davidsons. They had a waiting list of about a year, so someone with a pile of cash who was dying to get a brand new Harley simply couldn't do it. This guy would order 2 Harleys every 6 months. He usually had them sold before it was time to go pick them up (and he also got a monster mark-up).

Taking advantage of scarcity in any market is a good way to pick up some easy money, but it can't be done at the last minute. You need to plan how to get the items, how to advertise the items, then how to get rid of the items well before the rush...

Out of all the 3 consoles battling for domination now, the Wii pretty much steals the competition and run away with it. It brought gaming into the mainstream. And yes it sells like hotcakes, well that is if you can get a good steady supplier..

It is so strange that Nintendo would hold back units throughout the year, because the real sales for the companies are the games, and the more hardware they have out there, the more people that will have it in their homes, and be able to spend additional money on games.

The Wii has really reached out and converted a lot of new video game fans. I think that if you could travel back in time, and over the past six months bought every wii you could find, only to sell them during December, you'd clean up!

As far as an IM niche, I personally love video games, and tried working that niche online. I didn't do real well, as you'd need a lot of volume to make decent commissions off of the games themselves.

As far as guides to play games, you can find that stuff for free so no luck there either.

I'm sure there's money somewhere, but that's been my experience.

Matt

As others have said, good luck finding one! To this day I've still never even seen one in a store, except for the launch day when I got mine (managed to reserve one early).

But yeah, as someone stated earlier the real money is made through the software sales, additional hardware (i.e. controllers), accessories, and nintendo branded products.

At this point it doesn't make any sense to withhold supply because they'll sell every console that hits the stores.

Solomon Huey