Amazon.com no more for game purchases: Hypothetical...

[Einan]

Some of the "discount sellers" charge 50 dollars to ship a single book to Europe.

Of course, there's one or two on eBay who do the same; one of these days I'm bound to order something from them by accident (and probably refuse to pay).

I'm a bit ignorant about what it costs to ship a book to Europe: what would be the actual cost to ship a D&D book to Europe?

Einan

 

[kigmatzomat]

I've only bought a few things online, mainly due to amazon gift cards. Generally the things I want aren't discounted when I want them (weird net karma for RPG stuff). So I typically buy at the FLGS. I admit, half my purchases are used stuff but that means that half isn't.

Haven't been in there in a while though. I wonder how Mike is doing....

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

1:Order far too much product of an item than it has a chance of clearing and offer them at full price, even though anyone with an internet connection and half a brain can get the product at 30 percent off or less.

Many places do this in order to qualify for bulk order discounts...which gets their per unit cost down closer to what the Amazons of the world are being charged. According to some past posts by people on these boards who actually own game shops, some of those online retail prices are lower than what the FLGSs are being charged wholesale- IOW, Amazon is selling below their costs to acquire new stock.

2:Have a huge backlog of unmovable product because of step 1. They can't afford to eat an entire loss so they discount it a little.
3:Its STILL not moving. Either its too niche, or too old, or too crappy, or too cheap at www.lowpricesthatgameshopscantcompetewith.com. They deep discount, even lower than the competition in desperation, and most likely still don't sell off the backlog.

If the online price is below the FLGS's wholesale price, they'll be quite hesitant to match that price. Thus, they hemmorage money in the form of lost opportunity costs. The superior tactic would be to discount the hell out of it, getting it off your shelf, and find another product your company can sell competitively...assuming there is one.

(If the online retailers are getting beneficial deals on all of the RPG and RPG related merchandise relative to your price, you need to complain or get out of the biz.)

The ways in which a FLGS can outshine an online retailer on a regular basis is in customer support and creating an environment that fosters loyalty and sales, like doing game demos, for instance, or hosting tournaments, or by having rentable game rooms and LAN setups.

4: Game Shop owner beeyotches about how the internet is killing game shops.

See above- if the internet retailers are being given an edge by the game companies the brick & mortar guys can't counter, then they are. You can't really blame the game companies, really- they're trying to get their product into as many shelves as possible, and bulk discounts to places like are one way of doing that.

And that's assuming that the online retailers aren't using the illegal technique of "predatory pricing"- roughly speaking, pricing a product far below costs and enduring losses in order to drive smaller competitors out of a market, gaining market share- ideally, getting a monopoly- and raising prices later. Frequently, those losses are cross-subsidized by other products. Electronic publishing & PDFs, of course, counter some of this. (The flipside is that people like me, who dislike PDFs, will be forced to either pay the higher prices or do without.)

Why would they do this?

The holy grail, if there is one, is to monopolize all of the little tie-in products to things like Star Wars, Buffy, etc., including the games they inspire. Despite Amazon & others online power, there are still promotional campaigns that ONLY go through LGSs.

To get those, they have to BECOME the game store of choice- and if getting the exculsive rights to sell a Star Wars RPG means selling D&D at a discount, they'll do it. If that comes to pass, though, don't expect to see them selling the smaller publishers' works.