Q&A: How GameStop’s three-person team optimized their resale funnel

In the dynamic world of mobile reselling, consistency can be difficult to maintain. Prices and demand constantly change with market changes, device launches, and consumer trends. But GameStop’s mobile trade-in and resale business is not only profitable; As expected so.

Behind that success is a team of three people. john hassVice President, Used Vehicles; Ryan PortnerProduct Manager; and daniel fanConservative Operations Manager. Together, they built a finely tuned resale funnel for GameStop that integrates automation, data, and customer insights into a high-performance system.

In this Q&A, the team explains how they partnered with B-Stock to improve trade-in pricing, implement automation, optimize resale performance, and transform inconsistent manual processes into a reliable revenue engine.

Jon Haes, Vice President, Pre-Owned

Trade-in Topics:

How has GameStop’s trade-in model evolved over the past few years, and what were the key decisions or changes that drove this change? Our mobile trade-in business has evolved significantly over the past few years. This is partly a need to accommodate our desire to run a lean organization, and partly to ensure that we can run a highly predictable and consistently profitable business. With a small team, we have refined our pricing process to take into account both expected future resale value and competitive pricing pressures. We have automated the pricing process to be accurate and efficient. We also overhauled our in-store trade-in process and installed new technology from Phoenix Innovations in our stores to expedite the trade-in evaluation process. This ensures that store processes are completed accurately and efficiently for both employees and customers.

What market signals/indicators (e.g. secondary market ASP trends, competitor offers) carry the most weight when evaluating trade-in prices or promotions? The most important thing to consider when setting your trade-in price (base trade-in price and promotions) is what you can sell each device for when it becomes available for sale. This requires a good view of future resale prices, and we leverage our own historical price curves, B-Stock’s price forecasting tool, and other sources to accurately predict these. Once you get your trade-in in store, it will take several weeks for the device to arrive at our facility for processing and wholesale draw, so we need to be sure what the price will be before we can sell it. We consider competitive pricing in our process, but this is definitely a secondary factor in our decision-making.

How do you and Lyann ensure that your trade-in strategy aligns with fulfillment and resale results? Are there regular checkpoints or data reviews that help you make these decisions? Yes, we completely re-price our entire catalog every week. Some weeks there will be little change due to market stability, while other weeks prices will change significantly due to impending product launches or other events in the business.

On the subject of processing:

In an interview last year, you mentioned that automation could allow GameStop to expand into additional product categories. What criteria will you use to decide which category comes first? Yes. We are already on that path. We piloted the Macbook trade-in program in select stores in the spring and successfully launched it in all stores this summer. We’re also launching our AppleTV trade-in program in all stores in September. The introduction of Phoenix Innovations’ in-store trade-in solution provides greater flexibility to add new product categories.

Resale Topics:

Besides Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) rates and customer feedback, what are the signs that your reselling process is peaking? Are there any benchmarks or trends that you watch closely? RMA rates and customer feedback are important to us. Additionally, if our auction bids and new customers continue to increase, that’s a good sign for us.

I have a team of 3 people. If you had to teach someone the reselling process in one day, what would you highlight as the most important steps or decisions? 1) Establish an effective pricing process that delivers value to consumers and businesses. 2) Efficient operation at the backend ensures fast product processing from intake to disposal. 3) Perform grading processes with high accuracy to ensure customer expectations are met or exceeded, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing RMAs.

Lyann Fortner, Product Manager

Questions about trade-in:

How do you balance trade-in pricing and promotions with expected resale performance (e.g. ASP, demand signals) to ensure incentives are neither too much nor too little? Offering cash payouts to our customers on the same day every day is our best incentive. This business model means we can offer competitive trade-in pricing and maintain a predictable flow of inbound inventory with expected margins. Within our cash/credit pricing structure, we may run promotions that encourage mobile device trade-ins at a similar frequency to the rest of our trade-in business (e.g., video game products) and benefit from increased transaction activity.

When you took on this role without a mobile background, what data or benchmarks helped you quickly understand how trade-in ties to resale performance? Our previous category management experience in retail allowed us to quickly plan the first 90 days. “We give Gamestop customers the right product mix at the right price.” The plan allowed me to dig into each component of my tech trades business, break some processes and build new ones, while learning in real time how each decision in one area affected the overall business. After laying the groundwork, I turned to industry experts to fill in the knowledge gaps.

Daniel Pan, Maintenance Operations Manager

Let’s talk about processing:

How has automation impacted your team’s ability to scale, refocus on higher-value tasks, or speed up decision-making? Automation has taken care of the two most time-consuming and technology-intensive steps in our process: cleaning and grading. This significantly reduces the training and expertise required for the role, making hiring and onboarding faster and more efficient. As a result, our teams can scale more easily, reallocate resources to higher-value activities, and respond with greater agility to business growth opportunities.

Based on your experience, what advice would you give me on sequencing my automation investments to quickly achieve measurable impact? Focus your automation investments on high-ROI areas, especially time-consuming tasks that require extensive training. Because these actions have the quickest measurable impact. Additionally, ensure that automation integrates seamlessly with existing systems to ensure physical operations and digital workflows are aligned.

What was the tipping point where manual grading no longer expanded? There are always ways to scale up manual grading, but it becomes increasingly difficult when rapid scale-up is required and attrition or turnover impacts the ability to maintain consistent production quality. These factors ultimately led to our decision to invest in automation.

How do you ensure that processing priorities (e.g. grading speed, drawing readiness) are in sync with trade-in and resale requirements? Effective production planning is essential to maintain processing priorities, such as grading speed and lot preparation, in line with trade-in and resale requirements. Production must be designed to scale to the maximum anticipated requirements, taking into account space constraints and automation capacity. Continuing to innovate to increase efficiency also creates additional buffer capacity to accommodate larger volumes when needed.

Besides automation, what other process changes have made the biggest difference in accuracy, speed, or team focus? Beyond automation, the implementation of the Shop Floor Controller (SFC) was one of the most impactful changes. This allowed us to optimize workflows, maintain accurate, real-time data, and seamlessly integrate process improvements with automation initiatives.

Let’s talk about reselling:

I managed some buyers myself before moving all my trade-ins through B-Stock. What was the biggest challenge? that The biggest challenge was managing individual buyers/orders. The overall scale of our business means that our buyers receive multiple outstanding requests each week. By consolidating sales with B-Stock, the sales process has been significantly streamlined.

How has dispute improvement and delivery speed changed on a daily basis? Our focus on improving our overall resale business through automation and consolidating sales to B-Stock has had the downstream effect of improving delivery speeds and significantly reducing customer disputes. Today, we have record-low dispute rates, a result of improvements made by our operations team and through automation and internal processes.

How do you know when your resale flow is performing best? Are there any signals, indicators or customer behaviors that stand out? Our customer appeal rate is a quick pulse check to ensure we are meeting customer expectations. With Phoenix Innovations software solutions, your resale performance is optimized when you have an inventory dashboard and see your inventory moving without delays.

You are new to mobile when you sign up. If you had to teach someone the reselling process in one day, what would you highlight as the most important steps or decisions? The basics of retail arbitrage can be applied to any category. This means understanding your product, revenue potential, and market. It becomes the basis for all decisions, Are we doing our best for our customers? Provides competitive trade value to store customers and extends to market customers, ensuring they receive high quality auction lots that adhere to standardized grading criteria.

GameStop’s three-person team has built more than just an efficient resale funnel. They created a repeatable framework for predictable and profitable growth. Haes, Fortner, and Pan combined automation with B-Stock’s resale market intelligence to build a resale engine that scales efficiently without losing accuracy. The result is a resale funnel that is not only profitable but also incredibly resilient. It’s a testament to what focus, insight, and strategic partnerships can achieve in lean operations.

The team is currently seeing record-low dispute rates and an 11% year-over-year increase in auction bidding activity. This is proof that operational changes lead directly to market performance.

Take a look at the full infographic to see exactly how the GameStop team organizes every step of the resale process, from trade-in and device processing to resale optimization on B-Stock.

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