In the last 10 years, as retail has become the ascendant driving force behind modern consumption practices and the great establisher of ‘trends,’ quietly, a movement has been afoot in which consumer have become unauthorized guerilla resellers of brand new packaged goods.
Add this notion of reselling brand new goods to…the pre-order goods marketplace...and add this to the web auction and you get... individual consumers posing as instant online guerilla retailers.
As the holiday season approaches, the usual camp-outs for new toy releases are springing up all over. These ‘pre-order’ rituals orient often to video game consoles and toys but, with innovative marketing, could spread to other categories.
Here’s a forum post from an anonymous playstation devotee revealing a new way to leverage the pre-order culture into a revenue stream mediated by...no one:
“I'm thinking of camping for a pre-order [playstation] so I can get it on Ebay. I need the extra money and I was thinking, It's just buy low sell high and not like stealing or anything.”
We see huge opportunities in consumer-to-consumer reselling of new goods via auction and other drop-ship business portals. This is all about consumers tinkering with the very fabric of consumption, supply chains and retail.
We fear that it’s only a matter of time before manufacturers start asking for a cut…
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