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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sotterraneo" data-source="post: 888774" data-attributes="member: 3296">I'm not a publisher, just a retailer from the other side of the world (quite literally...) but I hope my comments may give you some useful ideas.In my opinion the best move for starting a local distribution company in a situation like yours, judging from a retailer's perspective, is signing up with the Alliance/Diamond conglomerate and open an account with them. This will let you able to buy products from a lot of publishers and receiving the goods together, so saving quite some money if compared to receiving many expeditions from many US publishers (not to mention customes duties and red tape!). More, a shipment from, let's say, 20 or 30 publishers is big enough to perhaps justify shipping expenses, even if you import just two or three copies of various titles.The big question is that if there are just three or four stores in New Zealand, perhaps all the expenses associated with setting up a company couldn' be justified: I don't know what exactly are the expenses ofr running a business there, but you have to consider, these are random examples, start up expenses, pension contributions, taxes, import duties, paying for an accountant and the expense of a place where stocking the goods for example.You could in my eyes perhaps do better becoming an online retailer after signing up with Alliance/Diamond. You have to register a company for various clear reasons, but some costs (for example a warehouse or something similar) may be avoided. More, you can sell direct to customers and so get a bigger return (and you will learn why D&D books are so 'costly' there). More, you can always beat the convention circuit to gather customers, keeping them informed via e-mail. I have a supplier of mine using exactly this strategy. The real market here is for the sale of Italian edition of various games - for example 25 Edition has the D&D III and Vampire license, Nexus Editrice LotR CCG and Wizkids Games license, Hasbro has of course everything Wizards etc. There is a small company having the 'official distribution' for original material from various big US publishers such as White Wolf, Steve Jackson Games and so on. But they target a niche market, fans of original (English) material, and their 'exclusive' doesn't stop Alliance/Diamond from selling their wares to others, including this supplier of mine.  He has set up a website detailing carefully all its offers and services, with a certain discount of compared with regular store prices. Mind you, I'm the first to consider Internet retailers an enemy due to their obscene discounts (no wonder so many of them sink after a year of two) and the fact they 'prey' on existing customers without adding nothing to the customers' numbers, but after discussing at lenght with him and pointing the fact that a retailer will never, ever do business with a company desiring to destroy his business, he decided to lower its discounts for Italian language material, focusing on English material: this is such a niche market that this thing doesn't really bothers me or my colleagues. He seems going quite well and it has reached a number of retailers with his services. Beyond understanding that you can't be both a supplier of retailers and a competitor of them,  he knows well the products, doesn't have problems in ordering ?esoteric' (meaning as 'non mainstream') and albeit his administration skills need to be sharpened a little he is reasonably efficient. I suppose you can do the same.</blockquote>

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