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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steve Conan Trustrum" data-source="post: 2694673" data-attributes="member: 1620">Some people will do it because of how they choose to make their payment. If you have to write out a money order every time you order online, you're likely going to consolidate at one place. People who pay fees on their card or electronic payment method (such as a Paypal account transfer) are also likely to try and consolidate to keep the fees down. And yes, while a typical shopper likes to look around for the best price, their are indeed shoppers who like to stick with one place for various reasons ranging from brand loyalty, laziness (they don't want to go through the bother of setting up a new account), etc.It's not a low opinion. It's a realistic opinion. My job is observing how customers act and react in a given market so it's safe to say that I see this on a regular basis. Not every individual fits the bill, to be sure, but I think people would be rather shocked to learn some of the more ... unusual ... things that a typical consumer will base a purchase on, or use as a basis to decide upon where to buy. For example, a majority of customers consider a product's appearance to be a larger part of their decision for purchasing personal electronics than actual functionality--they have a habit of turning away from the better product because something else appears better to them. That's not an insult meant to give slight to you or anyone else, but it is a simple matter of fact--most things that a layman assumes about themselves and other people as consumers are blatantly false due to rose-colored glasses of self-bias.That would be me.Sorry, but you're making large assumptions here. You're operating under the rather unproven assumption that gamers diverge from the norm in this regard. For your point to stand, you first have to prove that gamers are more likely to be professionals, college-educated, etc. than the random people. Following that, I'd also point out that you're forgetting an important fact: most consumer studies actually break down groups into education and economic demographics so as to be able to compare market penetration across the spectrum and not just in general, as would be the case with entirely random sampling. Knowing that, I can also assure you that in the terms that we've been talking here, such demographics have only a minimal amount of affect on what we're talking about. College-educated and professionals, for instance, are not any less likely to be impulse shoppers.When selling a product, a cardinal rule is never assume your customer will fill in the blanks for themselves as far as product information goes. True that a good many who have been here for a while would likely go "oh, Company X, I seem to recall they sell at Y" but does that extend for the people who don't recognize the company and where they sell, such as would be the case with a brand new company? What about first time buyers who aren't aware of what storefronts are out there selling game PDFs? Again, you're operating under a great deal of assumption as to what a consumer knows, let alone how they'll act, and someone who actually makes money based on what a customer does or does not know is unlikely to want to risk that if they don't have to.EnWorld would be skewed in some respects if I were to conduct research here, true, because they are not representative of the typical gamer. Most will, however, be representative of the typical consumer, in the general sense, for reasons previously pointed out. Keep in mind, being a gamer does not affect one's general purchasing trends or decisions--"gamer" isn't some sort of special consumer awareness training, so looking at people here in this context and saying "but they're gamers!' rather than just accepting them as consumers is a big mistake.Yep, which is why it's a good thing that the largest vendor I sell at has a referencing system so that I can tell how many people buying my product come from here, my own site, RPG.net, etc. While the data isn't 100%, because someone traveling from here could do something to reset this reference data before actually making the purchase, it is valid enough to get a general picture of who is coming from where to make purchases. So no, this information is not coming out of the dark, blindly.Except actual tracking data provided by customer purchases says otherwise.</blockquote>

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