Not likely to be a popular opinion But since I no longer distribute, ill say what many dists feel.

Having been a distributor, you are regulated on how low a price a pin could be sold for. You have to eat profits on slow movers or games which don’t sell and since you can’t sell below the agreed price, you may have to hold inventory on unpopular games for a long time to recover the investment.

Margins on pins are low and customer expectations are high. God forbid there is damage in shipping. While those are covered under insurance, I never had a scenario where that happened and didn’t cost a bunch to remedy one way or the other, often eating a big chunk of profits from a batch of sales. Not to mention the HUGE amount of time those damaged games eat up trying to get to a resolution with the carrier.

Having sold many pins to customers who never took possession and then flipped for far more profit than I as a distributor, it was extremely aggravating especially the last few years I was distributing. It became common to see this happen when the pin market jumped, with almost 25-30% of sales being flipped by the original buyer prior to receiving. It required time and effort to make changes to orders so a person with a small deposit on a pin could flip to someone else for more profit. Rarely did the buyer agree to a “service fee” for this effort without a mountain of bitching. The distributor is stuck with the service, support and warranty claims and yes warranty claims costs distros money. It was extremely frustrating. I don’t begrudge any dists who are now taking that profit for themselves. They have staff, overhead, the usual business expenses and deserve the profit more than someone who put a deposit down and flipped without ever receiving IMO.

Ok. Enough said. Flame away…