Interview with Glyde: Your Gateway to Selling Used Games

The number of vessels for selling and buying used games continues grow. With Gamestop’s sales soaring arguable due to America’s economic stature, we have seen bigs such as Amazon, Toys R Us, Walmart, and more enact plans to buy back gamer’s goods to resell.

GotGame was fortunate enough to trade words with Nicolas Huryn, community manager of a new used media marketplace called Glyde.

Let’s see what its like for a brand spanking new start-up enter the fray amongst the countless others.
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GotGame: How did Glyde come to fruition and how many people are involved?
Nicolas Huryn: Glyde was started by Internet veterans from eBay, AOL, and Excite. Through our eCommerce experiences, we found that the existing alternatives for buying and selling games, movies, music, and books online force a trade-off: either pay full retail price, or navigate a complicated online marketplace. We think buying and selling can be both well priced and easy. So, we built a great core team of engineers and business folks and invested significant time and money over the past couple of years to create Glyde.

GotGame: What is the basic premise of Glyde?
NH: Glyde combines the great prices of an online marketplace with the ease of a retail experience. Buyers get great deals on quality used (and new) video games, DVDs, CDs, and books and experience the ease, simplicity, and safety of a retail store. We think it’s pretty compelling to buy a used game – which plays just as well as a new game – at up to 90% off retail, and buy it in a retail environment.

For sellers, for the first time it is truly easy to turn your games into money at a fair price. We’ve stripped all of the effort out of selling games online. You can list an item for sale on the Glyde marketplace in less than 10 seconds, with only a few clicks. When the item sells, we send pre-addressed, pre-stamped packaging to the seller, who simply drops the item into the mailer and puts it in the mail.

GotGame: What has been the initial response to the site?
NH: We’ve been really excited by what we’ve heard. Gamers especially love our selling proposition. Instead of getting ripped off by trading a game in, they can get fair value for a game when they are done with it – often 50% or more than trade-in. And they are shocked by how easy it is – they don’t even need to leave the house to ship. We keep getting compared to Netflix as far as how easy it is.

GotGame: How do you forsee the growth of Glyde?
NH: We’re just now beginning to let gamers know about Glyde. As more and more gamers learn how easy it is to sell, we’re confident the marketplace will take off. A gamer can sell a game with no effort, get more money for their game than through a trade-in, then use that money to buy another game on Glyde at a great price… and on it goes.

GotGame: How does Glyde separate itself from other competitors, new and old alike (i.e. Gamestop, Goozex, ValuValu, Amazon, ect…)?
NH: Each of the other players in the game market offers a different value to gamers. Because we offer great prices combined with a retail experience, we think Glyde stacks up well. If you buy a new game at retailers like Amazon or Gamestop, you’ll have a good experience – but let’s be honest: You’ll pay the retail price premium for it. If you trade in and buy used games at Gamestop, using Glyde lets you keep a lot more of your money.

We take only a 10% transaction fee on sales – as anyone who has ever traded in a game at Gamestop knows, Gamestop pays a lot less than fair value, and then marks up the game 100% or more in many cases. That’s just absurd. Some of the other newer players in the space like Goozex get this as well, and we like that they are trying to let gamers keep more of their money. We’ve taken a different approach by also focusing on making the whole process ridiculously easy.

GotGame: Glyde seems to be dominated by books, movies, and music. That’s wonderful,but where’s the games man? There’s only like 20 pages for games compared to easily five times that in books.
NH: We have several hundred games on the site right now across all of our supported platforms. We’ve already done some book outreach and the supply has really taken off – we have over a million books for sale already.

We’re just now starting to turn our attention to gamers and we’d love to have more games for sale. As gamers hear how easy it is to sell and get a fair price, we think they’ll fill out our supply pretty quickly. We think games have the potential to be our best category because the price points are higher and the dominant trade-in model leaves a lot to be desired.

GotGame: Right now there doesn’t seem to be any games older than Playstation 2 one’s available. Was that a choice by Glyde or simply the result of nobody currently having Genesis or old Nintendo titles for sale?
NH: We support all of the major modern consoles – PS3, PS2, PSP; Wii, Gamecube, DS; Xbox360 and Xbox. We made the decision not to support older platforms in order to keep Glyde as clean, simple, and easy as possible for the vast majority of games that people are playing today.

GotGame: The mosaic widget on Glyde is fun to play with; are there any other widgets Glyde is working on for the future?
NH: Thanks – we dig the mosaic widget. Games, DVDs, CDs, and books are visually interesting and a great way for people to express themselves, so if we find that lots of people use the mosaic, we’ll work on some other cool ideas.

GotGame: What’s the point of requiring sellers to purchase a Glyde Envelope? To prevent mail discrepancies or some other reason?
NH: By providing the packaging, we take all of the effort out of completing a sale – it allows us to pre-stamp the envelope so a seller simply has to drop the item into the mail. There’s no trip to the store to buy packaging, no stamps to lick, and no post office visit. It also allows us to provide a retail buyer experience – they get their item in our quality, branded mailer and we can track the shipment to make sure it arrives safely.

GotGame: I see that Glyde encourages members to donates sales to charity. Not many marketplaces to my knowledge do this, why the noble decision to include it in Glyde?
NH: We believe that building a great business and helping communities can and should go hand-in-hand – so we decided to build a charitable element into the DNA of the company from the very beginning. People have lots of stuff sitting on their bookshelves collecting dust, and we think that if you give them the ability to donate proceeds with a simple click, many will do so. It’s just never really been easy before.

GotGame: Last but not least, how much would you give me for my Miyamoto signed Legend of Zelda Gold Cartridge?
NH: Well, that’s just awesome and you’d be crazy to part with it. However, to be fair, any unique collector’s item like this where the price isn’t well known probably should be placed on eBay with other collector’s items, where an auction can set the price.

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There you have it kiddies! Hopefully this provides some good insight on starting a new marketplace setting on the web. Check out Glyde at their website and share your experience with us.