Thank you so much for your comments. Thank you for taking so much time to write a thorough post. It gave me a lot to think about. I am going to try to respond to some of the main points now.
hi there,
most of the prices seem good but i think the following would have to come down a little bit to be in the fair range imo:
cutey honey is hard to find at times because there are a few clowns on yahoo auction who bought up quite a few of them and sell them for a lot of money but, i have seen it going for $60 when it pops up in stores
team innocent can go fairly for $16 i think
tenchi muyo can go fairly for $20+
yuna can go fairly for $18-$22
Yeah, from time to time I see these games in stores at low prices and if I was running this store as a hobby I would be picking them up and listing them here. Unfortunately since this is a business I cannot depend on the inventory of local gameshops (or places like Yahoo auctions for that matter). We can often have 20+ orders coming in a day and it would be impossible to be constantly visiting stops to fill all of them. We did that in the early days and right now we have bought everything worth buying at all the game stores in the city and neighboring cities.
We rely on Japanese wholesalers and resellers. About 3 times a week we place large orders to several different places to restock our inventory. Most of these places don’t carry PC-FX at all. From the ones that do, we choose the lowest prices.
Cutie Honey is a good example. We can’t get it for $60 (stores can because they buy it from people for $20). On a shopping trip I might see a copy for, say, $50. I could sell that one copy for $60 and still make a profit but I would have to be constantly adjusting the prices on each individual item. It is, sadly, not a feasible solution.
We have to sell for the prices we know we can consistently buy the items for. And that sucks for us too because we know some of these things are overpriced (as I said in my first post). The only options we really have are to delist the product and not deal with it or keep it on at its high price. We can’t run all over town every time we sell something and we can’t sell items at a loss.
We do however work as hard as we can to keep our prices lower than places like eBay and other online stores.
other games really fluctuate. you should concentrate on the cheap games that have been a little harder to find such as:
super power league fx
blue chicago blues
return to zork
as these are highly playable for non-japanese speakers, are relatively cheap, were full releases, two of them are pc engine sequels and - for whatever reason, not in great circulation right now.
Are Return to Zork and Blue Chicago Blues highly playable for non-Japanese speakers? I know they were both originally American games, but I was led to believe that the PC-FX versions are entirely re-dubbed in Japanese with Japanese menus.
But yeah, we actually have both of those games on order right now.
team innocent and battle heat are must-owns and the most well-known games for the console. they are also among the most common. i have sold lots of them over the years while shopping for friends and have never had to look far to get buy them for $9-$12. the occasional store will sell them for too much (e.g. akihabara's newest store is retro game and they were selling T.I. for like $40 today which is a RIIIIIIIIIIIIIP off imo).
Yeah, we get Battle heat fairly cheap and sell it for $11. We used to sell it for $9 but the distributor who had it at that low price sold all their copies (probably to us)
Team Innocent is an enigma to me. It should be the most common and cheapest title on the system but it doesn't seem to be the case. Our cheapest distributor charges $16 for it, plus shipping of course, (One wholesaler wants $33 a copy for it!) and the local retro stores are charging like $25 a copy for it. I KNOW if should be cheaper than that. We don’t really make a profit on this game at this time. The only reason we offer it on our store at all is that it is a popular game and it would be weird if we didn’t have it.
you should also focus on the ceap JRPGs like:
blue breaker
lunatic dawn
last imperial prince
which you can sell fairly (and find easily!) for $20+. well, blue breaker should never go too far above $15 really as it is very common.
Yup, we have most of those on order.
if you're thinking of going the FX route and need to keep it cheap for all involved, these games are the best way to go for a start. good luck!
Again thank you so much for your comments. I have read a lot of your posts and I know you are helping the PC-FX community a lot by finding those common titles for people and selling them pretty much at cost to the fans. I hope I can turn my store into a good place for people to buy games as well. With the help of people like you and all the other supportive comments I have received here I just might be able to. Thank you everyone.
