[crazygringo]

I'm just saying, 13.25% isn't the barrier here to making this work.

And shipping things to a "GameStop near you" does not cost pennies, and most people hate having to pick up packages. The reason that can be cheaper for regular stores is because they're distributing from central warehouses to those stores anyways. If GameStop is holding inventory trapped in all these physical stores, shipping an item from one store to another is no cheaper than shipping it directly to the customer -- e.g. it's edge node to edge node, not central node to edge node.

[shaftway]

Oh yeah, not a barrier, but for the volume they'd want to enable it's not a complete loss.

Remember who uses GameStop. It's certainly not me, and it's probably not you. I'd guess that their core demographic is 14-25 year olds that are cash-strapped. You don't go to a GameStop for the experience, and their prices aren't any better than any other retailer. You go there because you don't have options or for their secondary market. And at that point, $5 in shipping fees matters.

Why would it be edge --> edge and not edge --> central --> edge? For common stuff keep half of it at the edge for local sales. For uncommon stuff or the other half ship it back to central so they can re-ship it quickly and easily. Including something in a shipment is orders of magnitude cheaper than shipping a single item, just in packaging costs and time alone.

They must have items going both directions (to handle overstock, returns, defectives, etc.). I assume those all go in a large box and are shipped together. At that point I'd need to see some actual numbers to agree that it's not pennies.

[ericmay]

Interesting discussion. Something it made me think about is trading cards or other items you typically might want to sell as graded items. If you’ve got a physical GameStop with the digital eBay footprint maybe you’ve got the makings of a nice little ecosystem for selling Pokémon cards, video games, antiques, and other items in an inspected condition.