Repricing 9,000 DVD barcodes a month against CEX
Take a stock of DVDs and Blu-rays with every barcode kept in a spreadsheet, and one number to judge it all by: what CEX would pay in cash. Here's how that number stays up to date across the whole list, every month, without typing a single barcode into a search box.
The list
Disc stock adds up quietly. Fifty to a hundred new titles a week, every week, and the list stands at around 9,000 barcodes. Most of them are worth very little each. A handful at any time are worth a good deal more than they were, and those are the ones that matter.
Why CEX cash is the number
CEX's cash price is the floor. It is what a disc is worth today with no listing, no postage and no waiting for a buyer, which makes it the benchmark for what is worth buying and what each disc on the shelf is worth right now.
The price is worth having even where CEX isn't currently buying a title online. A disc CEX will only take in store is still worth knowing about, so the results say which is which rather than leaving the price out.
Why monthly
CEX prices don't move evenly. The ordinary disc sits at the same few pence for months; a box set that goes out of print can move by pounds. Checking 9,000 barcodes by hand, at ten seconds each, would be about 25 hours, which nobody does on the off-chance. Once a run takes minutes, repricing the whole list every month is simply part of the routine.
How a run goes
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Export the list
The spreadsheet you already keep, with its own columns. Only the barcode column is needed.
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Drop it into bulk pricing
Pricesweep looks up 50 barcodes at a time against CEX, so 9,000 is a couple of hundred requests and two or three minutes, not a day.
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Read it by value
Every row comes back with CEX cash, voucher and sell price, and whether CEX is buying it online or in store only. Sorted by cash, the few worth acting on sit at the top.
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Download and carry on
The spreadsheet comes back with your own columns intact and the prices added alongside.
The awkward rows are handled. On a list built up over years, some barcodes have been replaced by CEX: the old record is renamed to point at the new barcode and its prices set to zero. Read literally, those look worthless. Pricesweep follows the replacement and prices that instead. And if a run stops partway, it can be resumed rather than started again.
Does this sound like your stock?
- Hundreds or thousands of barcodes already in a spreadsheet, of DVDs, Blu-rays, games, CDs or books.
- CEX cash as your benchmark for buying and selling.
- No wish to maintain a scraper or a script to get the prices.
Then the same routine works for you. See how bulk CEX price checks work, and how repricing shows what moved since your last run.
Price your own list
A free account prices 50 barcodes a month in bulk, enough to see it work on your own stock. Power Seller (£14.99 a month) prices up to 40,000.