As with many hobbies, retrocomputing has its resellers, who make a profit out of buying and selling old games and computers. In this article, I provide my personal perspective on the reselling business as I explain where the profit comes from.

You might argue that most retrocomputing enthusiasts are resellers to some degree. If you are a collector, you know the dilemma: To get that one game for your collection , you need to buy a whole lot. And obviously, you don’t throw the rest of it into the bin. Instead, you list the items on eBay, Facebook Marketplace or some other local platform.

But not all resellers are collectors. I consider myself a hobbyist, but I don’t collect retroequipment. When I make a purchase, my main goal is to sell it and earn a profit in the process, although it goes without saying that I enjoy what I do for many reasons.

While reselling as a means of building one’s personal collection is widely accepted, opinions towards profit-driven resellers are more divided. On one hand, some people appreciate that resellers contribute to the community by keeping old computers alive and making them accessible to a wider audience. On the other hand, I still now and then encounter the perception that resellers are little more than shady, profit-driven middlemen whose only contribution is to inflate prices.

I can of course primarily speak on my own behalf here, but the latter perception is far from the reality that I experience.

Buying below market value or selling above is something that rarely happens. In reality, the vast majority of the profit comes from improving the items and making them available at more attractive terms — not from inflating prices.

In this post, I hope to provide some insight into how the retrocomputing-reselling business works.

Refurbishing and repairing

Making a profit out of reselling retro equipment starts with buying the right items. Personally, I look for items with a clear “room for improvement” and a price-tag that reflects the current condition.

I mostly buy untested or defective items, which I can restore and repair and thereby increase the value to a profitable level. Although I don’t repair everything, I work from the principle that nothing goes into the bin, unless there is no hope of restoring it to a workable state without spending an excessive amount of time.

Quite often, I find myself spending hours repairing cheap joysticks and datasettes. They represent limited value, but I enjoy repairing them. On other occassions, items may be functionally okay but visually in a horrible state. In some cases, I just keep the working parts for spares. In other cases, what looks like a hopeless endeavor turns out really well. Take as an example this Commodore 64, which had spent the last 30 years in a Swedish loft …

Testing

As simple as it may seem, the ability to test properly is one of the cornerstones in a retro-reselling business.

Many of the computers that I buy and sell, have passed the 40-year milestone, meaning that they have surpassed their expected product life multiple times. And when I look at my recent purchases, it is fair to say that age begins to show:

Variant	% defective
C64 “Breadbin” and early C64C (“longboard” variants)	45%
Later C64c (“shortboard” variants), C64G and C64 “Aldi”	31%
Total (n=35)	40%

For the same reason, the days when it was sufficient to claim that it worked when it was put in the attic in 1990 are long gone. Buyers are now increasingly concerned with the state of the equipment and aware of the importance of proper and thorough tests.

And that concern is clearly reflected in the prices: On average, a “guaranteed working” Commodore 64 currently sells for approximately 80% more than an “untested” Commodore 64.

Despite that difference, many retro-computers are listed as untested and therefore also sold without any warranty.

For some sellers, the lack of testing comes down to a lack of ability. To test a computer thoroughly enough, you need knowledge and in many cases a substantial amount of peripherals or specialized test equipment, both of which can be quite expensive.

And even if you have some ability to test your old equipment, it may make more sense to leave everything as is. If the tests you can perform won’t suffice to list the items as guaranteed working anyway, there’s little reason to risk running them and thereby confirm that your items most definitely isn’t working anymore.

Sometimes it is better not knowing.

The fact that many retro lots are listed as untested leaves an opportunity for resellers with a bit of technical flair. Many resellers have the capacity to perform the tests needed to determine with certainty whether the machine is working or not. And if it doesn’t work, they can make the repairs or salvage the spareparts. A working C64 may sell for less than €100 but it contains spareparts worth €200. Even a badly damaged machine may still constitute a value.

Warranties

Speaking about warranties, this is another area where resellers have an opportunity to add value. Even if you won’t get a full 1-year warranty on a retro-computer, it still makes a difference that the seller warrants that the equipment is in the agreed shape upon reception.

Now, anyone may of course offer a warranty, but the perceived value depends on who the seller is.

A private seller listing an item as “working” may legally have issued a warranty, but buyers will be unlikely to associate any value with such a warranty unless there is evidence to support that the seller in fact will issue a refund, repair or replace the item if required.

Many resellers have build a reputation, and maintain long lasting track records of flawless reviews on various online marketplaces. Obviously, the risk of dealing with someone, who holds a 5/5 rating across hundreds of reviews, is significantly less than if the seller is a random person on the internet.

All the other risks

Even when the price reflects that things are sold without any warranty what so ever, there is still a risk of losing money. Despite all my best aspirations, I estimate that approximately 1 in 20 purchases result in a loss. I have included some of the risks that do materialize now and then:

• Fraudulent sellers, who never ship the package.
• Items damaged during transportation due to insufficient packaging and with the seller rejecting responsibility.
• Items beyond repair. Now and then, the purchased items turn out to be in such a poor state that any hope of restoration to a sellable state is futile.
• Faults on my side, for example misidentifying items or misreading the text, which in turn leads to an overly optimistic valuation.
• Items damaged during shipping between me and the buyer, even if packaging was up to normal standards.

Part of the service or “value-add” that resellers offer to their buyers is to alleviate concerns such as the above.

Dividing for convenience

A somewhat overlooked aspect of the retro-business is the profit generated buy splitting large lots into separate items. As explained in a recent blog post, an item that would have sold for €100 if listed separately, will depreciate signficiantly when sold as part of a larger lot. Seen from the reseller’s perspective, buying a lot of 50 items means that you already have made a profit of 30-40%, provided you list the items separately.

The mechanism at play here is not just a simple volume discount. For the buyer, it saves inconvenience and risk that he is allowed to buy only the exact items that he wants instead of buying the whole lot. That is of course worth a premium.

Additionally, I find that people who sell large lots, tend to forget some items from the description and photos, meaning that neither the seller nor the buyer will consider them when valuating the lot. But those items may still generate a revenue and thereby contribute to the profitability.

Picking the right marketplaces

So far, I have covered how resellers make a profit by either improving the goods or the terms of business. But there are more ways to make a profit.

A little anecdote may serve a purpose here.

I recently acquired the Fischertechnik Interface kit below. To those who haven’t heard about it before, it is a device that allows you to control Fischertechnik robots from your Commodore 64.

The kit was listed at an auction in a local Facebook-group. It was up for sale for about a week, and I ended up winning it as the only bidder. Subsequently, I listed it at an online marketplace, as I hoped to attract the attention from German buyers. It was eventually sold at a considerably higher price.

This isn’t a story about making a business out of pure arbitrage, though. The main point here is that picking the right sales channel is crucial.

For the same reason, the choice of when and where is a consideration every single time I list an item. And it should go without saying that experience is a key element in making that decision. The more often you list the same type of item, the greater your ability to select the right place and time.

Some final thoughts

I still now and then encounter the perception that resellers are nothing more than price-hiking middlemen, who make a profit out of inflating prices at the cost of everyone else. Or sellers, who are absolutely convinced that I’m trying to scam them into selling their stuff below market value. But as seen above, you don’t need to buy anything below market value or sell anything above market value to make a profit.