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This year, video game sales is expected to top $10 billion. With prices per game exceeding $50, video game sales is a lucrative industry with a lot of opportunity!

Video game sales traditionally have been the domain of large retailers such as Best Buy and Circuit City and a few small electronics retailers, but with a web savvy generation of video game buyers, you can tap into this market by starting a video games sale website. You will be in a cutthroat competition industry where retail prices are held steady by large game publishers but by combining some marketing knowledge, gaming experience, and building a community site, your online video games retailer can thrive in this industry.

The investment required for this type of site is not significant compared to opening a retail video game store, but it is still significant compared to starting a run of the mill website. Requiring ecommerce expertise and site building skills, you will invest good money in a great site.

This type of site needs to be specifically designed to attract gamers and should include community features to achieve this. We recommend working with existing, highly trafficked, gaming websites to promote your site. This may require a significant marketing budget, but will be well worth it to grow the business quickly.

How do I get started?

You will need an ecommerce website developed for this online video games store. Additionally, as we mentioned earlier, we recommend building in community features - game reviews, social networking, game hints and cheats, and other game related news - to build your brand.

You can hire a web design firm or use a service such as Guru.com or eLance.com to find a web developer. These services allow you to post bids for the web design work globally. You could also design the site without ecommerce features and outsource ecommerce to one of the many providers on the web. This will cost money in the long term, but will save on startup capital.