Many of my friends know that I used to sell golds/currencies in games. Though, none of them knows how I started my game gold business and how it had changed my life.
In high school, I always had the idea of selling online game items on eBay. This idea first came to me when I was playing Diablo 2. I found out that there were thousands of Diablo 2 items listed on eBay, and this encouraged me to find more items in Diablo 2 so I could sell them on eBay. Of course, the idea of selling on eBay never happened due to not having an eBay seller account (not old enough to have a credit card). Everything changed 3 years ago when my brother was playing the game, MapleStory, and my friend borrowed me his eBay seller account. From then on, success came one after another.
The First Sale
My first eBay sale was "MapleStory Global WEST 2 Million Mesos Maple Story" on 17:35:48 PDT, Apr. 26, 2005 (Grade 11), and it was sold to Glenn Peeler for $20USD. This sale had marked the start of my business career. Then there was the second sale on May 7, 2005, and the buyer, queenofbroke, had been a very loyal customer ever since. At that time, I was only selling few items a month due to the limited amount of "mesos", MapleStory game currency, that one character could farm.
Buying Mesos, Selling Items
One of my competitors and eventual supplier, Mesos.org, was launched on November, 2005. They were making a lot of money, because they controlled the whole MapleStory mesos market, and their website was being advertised heavily on Sleepywood.net, the largest MapleStory community on the internet. One of the best decisions that I made was I bought 2x 25 Million Mesos on Scania from Mesos.org for $180.00 USD on Nov. 14, 2005. Subsequently, I used those mesos to buy MapleStory items such as steelies, blue/red/black bandanas, and other hard to find items. Then, I sold them on eBay for a decent profit. Some time in December of 2005, Mesos.org's PayPal account was suspended, so they couldn't sell mesos anymore. Consequently, my mesos supply had been stopped, and I couldn't sell as many items on eBay as before. My guess was that Mesos.org withdrew all the money from the PayPal, and chargeback occurred and there was no money to cover the chargebacked amount so their account was limited. Then they couldn't verify their information with PayPal so their account was suspended.
The Decision That Changed My Life
Before Christmas (December 20th - December 25th) of 2005, I had made my first business decision: I contacted Mesos.org them to ask can I send $360 for 100 million mesos by Western Union. At that time, $360 meant a lot to me, and they could have not give me the mesos. Eventually, I sent them the money, and I had waited 5 hours for them to deliver the mesos. That 5 hours almost gave me a nervous breakdown. To make the decision to buy mesos from Mesos.org by Western Union had caused me to lose few nights of sleep. Though, it was all worth it, because the transaction had given me the trust that I needed to continue buying mesos from Mesos.org. Afterward, I used the 100 million mesos to buy steelies, and then sold them all on eBay for a hefty profit.
The Start of the Mesos Selling Business
By January 2006, I had few loyal customers want to buy mesos, so I decided to start selling mesos on eBay. I bought mesos from Mesos.org and then resold them on eBay for a decent 100% profit. There were few small competitors, but they did not have the mesos supply. However, there was a Chinese seller, roseangel769, that could have waged a price war, but luckily he got into some personal problems and left the business for half year. That meant monopoly.
I did make fair amount of money for the first 2 months of this little monopoly. Making 10k in the first month and then dropped to 5k the next. Slowly, I lost the advantage as more Chinese sellers were appearing on eBay, and my profit was lowered to 1-3k a month.
During these few months, a lot of Chinese suppliers contacted me. They wanted to supply me mesos. Knowing that I can't rely on only one supplier (mesos.org), I responded to one of them and bought mesos. This supplier was crazy. He wanted me invest in his farming office when I only knew him for 2 days. Thought, he introduced his friend, Hong Bo, to sell his mesos to me.
Hong Bo messaged on MSN and asked do I want to buy mesos. Being cautious, I asked to meet him in game to verify that he had the mesos. He did and I western unioned him the money. Once again, this was non-refundable! There was no way I could get the money back if he decided to take the money and not give me the mesos. This time was worse because I was dealing with a Chinese. Not to discriminate my own race, but I had been educated that Chinese businessmen are very sneaky and a lot of them are scammers. They are willing to do anything for money. Nevertheless, I took the risk and the return was great. This transaction had built trust between Hong Bo and I. In fact, meeting Hong Bo was probably the luckiest thing that ever happened in life. He helped me to expand my game currency business and taught me how to purchase game currency supply from China's game farming networks. Not only did he teach me all that, he had also helped me to buy game currency supply at no charge/commission.
The suppliers are decentralized. You can't get all the currencies from one supplier and most of the time the transaction is small like $50 - $300RMB. Sending western union did not make sense because WU charge a high service charge so Hong Bo opened a bank account in China for me to buy supply. I didn't trust Hong Bo with the bank account since it was possible for him to withdraw money from that account, and I feared he might pull a big one on me. However, I still ended up using his bank account, but I only deposited one week of cash flow.
In May, competition had increased dramatically. Mesos.org was back with a new eBay account and there were a lot of Chinese spamming eBay with listings. Mesos.org was not much of a threat since he was selling mesos at a price close to mine because we had an agreement. However, the Chinese were selling them at a lower price and they spammed a lot of listings by using stolen eBay accounts which meant they didn't need to pay for eBay fees. Ebay charged almost 19% on the final value of the item sold. I didn't really make much during that summer. After writing off all the chargebacks, my profit margin was down to 10%. I did get a chance to expand into other games like SilkRoad, Eve Online, and Dofus.
The Start of Selling Dofus Kamas
By mid August, I gave up on MapleStory and moved on to Dofus, a french game. This was one of those decisions that I would say “Tony, you are a genius!”. The game at that time was not farmed and there was no efficient way to farm this game, and on top of that there was no guide so the Chinese couldn't farm it. So I decided to partner up with Hong Bo. Hong Bo's primary focus was on World of Warcraft, but his high level farming characters were slowly being banned. So he decided to help me develop this new niche. So I played the game and created a Chinese guide for his workers.
After I created the guide, Hong Bo hired 8 people and had them level in the game 24/7 (4 people playing 12 hours before switching shift). In October 2006, other Chinese farmers started to take notice of Dofus. Then bots, programs that automate tasks, started to appear because it was profitable business to develop bots and sell them to “farming offices”. Ankama, the company that created Dofus, figured out the bots were destroying the Dofus economy so they released a patch to mess up all the bots. This caused the kamas price to skyrocket.
Hong Bo was supplying me kamas at market price while I made nice profit from selling them on eBay. Also, I took notice that eBay.com is actually different from eBay.fr. Only listings posted on eBay France would appear on the eBay France site. This might sound really simple and not something important, but who would had guessed no one actually posted on eBay.fr and other international eBay markets like Germany. The whole German World of Warcraft gold market was dominated by one company for few years. That one company was probably making close to 50-70k a month. Because of this I had made close to 30K USD in 3 months with Dofus.
In January, 2007, eBay started removing all virtual goods listings. Ebay removed all the MapleStory mesos, SilkRoad gold, WoW gold, and all other online games' currencies listings. They didn't remove my listings on the eBay.fr until April, 2007 when they banned my eBay account and banned all my other eBay accounts that were linked to my PayPal account. Why? It was really simple. At first I had my listing title as “2 Million Dofus Kamas sur Raval”, but when I changed the title to “Dofus 2,000,000 sur Raval” and they didn't remove it. I couldn't believe no one else noticed it. Ebay created a bot to sweep through their listings for Dofus+Kamas, and MapleStory+Mesos so they couldn't catch my listings until they manually removed all my listings. I also reported all my competitions to eBay for selling virtual goods which ended up me becoming a monopoly.
There was no competition from March, 2007 to April 2007. These two months I was making from March 100% to 300% profit margin on the Dofus kamas. Hong Bo's sister called me 奸商(crooked businessman), because I was buying supply at $10 for 1 million kamas while selling them for $30/million. The supplier was making almost nothing, and they needed the cash to pay his workers and bills so they had to agree to my pricing. I was the largest Dofus kamas seller so I set all the kamas price in the market. True monopoly! This monopoly experience was more useful than taking Macroeconomic.
In March I anticipated sooner or later, they would ban the listings on eBay.fr too. So I created, MMOXpress.com (it is dead now because I forgot renew the domain) and started moving all my eBay customers to my site. The transition wasn't smooth as I expected. The French buyers didn't trust my site, and they were willing to pay an EXTRA 30% to buy on eBay than on my website! A bunch of lunatics!
By the time eBay banned me from creating new account by blacklisting my PayPal address, I had moved half of my loyal customers on eBay to MMOXpress.com. Because there was no new customer, I was only making 3/10 of the revenue. Once again, I pulled another rabbit out of the hat. I was looking over my traffic log, and I found out that some customers came to MMOXpress from wanadoo.fr. Then I did a bit of research on wanadoo.fr and found out that it is the largest internet provider of France. You just couldn't believe that they were using Yahoo as their advertisement provider and eBay was the only advertisement showed up when you searched “Dofus”. Yahoo was so smart that you couldn't advertise to the French unless you register an advertising account on Yahoo.fr. It was near impossible to register an advertising account without knowing French. It took me half a day to register one. Then I started few Dofus campaigns on Yahoo.fr and it turned out that I guessed right: there was no competition for dofus keywords. I made fair amount of money but not close to the amount I made with eBay.fr.
All came to the end in September, 2007. Wanadoo.fr switched their advertising partner to Google and I lost all my $0.10 clicks from Yahoo.fr. University started so I decided to close MMOXpress since there was little business left and I didn't have the heart to compete anymore. I was doing everything from buying supply to customer service and delivery. There was only so much one person could do so I decided to end it. Ending the business was actually a good decision, because my new web business turned out to be bigger and easier to manage.
i don't feel like going to school anymore...
edit*whats his name is being picky about the title
edit*i think he used the wrong unit, more like 20.7k
*reinstalls SRO and starts grinding face off*
