RPGNow Minimum Credit Card Purchase Amount

[Roudi]

I don't see a problem with RPGNow raising the minimum purchase price, especially when they already offer a service to get around it (it might require you to deposit $10 in your RPGNow account, but weren't you taught how to save up your pennies when you were a kid?)

Seriously though, I don't think the issue is the raise in the minimum purchase amount. I think it's a bad sign when publishers raises the prices of their products to accomodate it. That's where the problem is - rather than use the purchase amount hike as an opportunity to explore better product cross-marketing, they just raise their prices. Bad, bad move.

 

[D_Sinclair]

Yeah, that's a rather unfortunate but expected side effect. Come to think of it, that might actually cause me to spend a lot less over all...there's a lot that I'd pay $5 for that I wouldn't pay $6.40 for. That $1.40 is a price hike of over 25% and that percentage adds up when you make as many PDF purchases as I do.

Here at ARP, we went a different route, upping the price of a number of $1 items to $1.40 or more. Folks are more willing to pay an extra $0.40 for a $1 than are willing to pay an extra $1.40 for a $5.00 item. Didn't increase all the $1 items, but enough to provide some options to help fill out the minimum purchase when someone buys a $5.00 PDF.

 

[Roudi]

Personally I don't see why you & Dana felt it necessary to raise your prices at all. The minimum purchase increase actually encourages people to tack on more, smaller purchases on their orders. If they're just buying a $1 PDFs, then they are encouraged to buy MORE of your PDFs. There really isn't anything justifying your rate increase, even if it is a mere fourty cents on a dollar.

 

[Dimwhit]

Personally I don't see why you & Dana felt it necessary to raise your prices at all. The minimum purchase increase actually encourages people to tack on more, smaller purchases on their orders. If they're just buying a $1 PDFs, then they are encouraged to buy MORE of your PDFs. There really isn't anything justifying your rate increase, even if it is a mere fourty cents on a dollar.

Bingo. If I only had a $5 pdf I wanted to buy, but I needed $6.40, I would be more likely than anything else to find two $2 pdfs to up that price.

 

[HAR-Vee]

I have to concur. The raise of the minimum does not necessitate a raise of the vendor prices. Vendors that do raise prices won't be hitting my "favored" list and I'll still go for great deals offered by RPGO and other quality vendors.

 

[jaerdaph]

I just throw everything into my wishlist. Then, when I find a "must-have" item, I always have stuff to make the minimum. The bit that I don't like is how many PDFs suddenly jumped up in price to $6.40.

Exactly - the wish list is a great feature. I can fill the cart up with low cost items and "check out" when I reach the minimum total. I also keep higher priced items on my "maybe" list that I'm flirting with buying when I think I can use the product.

For the record, and on a related note, I just want all of you PDF publishers to know I now spend more money on PDFs than I do on print products. Keep up the good work and the great products!

 

[D_Sinclair]

Personally I don't see why you & Dana felt it necessary to raise your prices at all. The minimum purchase increase actually encourages people to tack on more, smaller purchases on their orders. If they're just buying a $1 PDFs, then they are encouraged to buy MORE of your PDFs. There really isn't anything justifying your rate increase, even if it is a mere fourty cents on a dollar.

Well, I'm guessing none of you actually run a business involved in the production of materials for consumer resale, so look at it this way.

The recent increase in the minimum purchase at RPGnow was a cue for vendors to take a look at their product lines and reassess the value of the products they offer. When we did so, we found that a number of our lower priced products were undervalued and adjusted accordingly.

Now to offset any argument you might have to the contrary, we also lowered the prices of a few products as well, including knocking 33% off the price of The Action Hero, knocking 50% off the prices of most of the Bargain Wheels line, knocking $1 off of the first book in the Lost Destinations line, and starting up the annual 2-month long christmas sale on the yearly collections for the Big Bang line, which equates out to a 45% discount when buying the bundles, which are normally discounted only about 15%.

 

[Roudi]

Hmm. Kudos to the drops in price of your other products - gotta give credit where credit is due. I'm sure your customers appreciate this as well.

However, I need to debunk two assumptions.

1) I highly doubt RPGNow intended the minimum purchase amount hike as a cue for publishers to re-evaluate the value of their products. At best, it's acknowledging you didn't consider the option of raising prices by now - at worse you're using this as a convenient excuse to raise them. Not accusing Alternate Reality Publishing of anything. My understanding of the situation is that the three who manage RPGNow are trying to ensure the percentage they earn from sales covers their costs for processing transactions. It certainly doesn't seem like any cue or message to the publishers who use their site. Rather, it appears more like a reflection of their rising operating costs.

2) Perhaps you haven't yet associated me with The Brood (I know Dana's heard of them) or with MODERNIZED. While Gallantry Productions, the publisher of MODERNIZED, has yet to embark on a "resale" venture, we certainly have the "production of materials for consumer" part down-pat. So, please, don't guess like that. You just embarass yourself.

 

[D_Sinclair]

Roudi, two problems with your efforts to debunk my assumptions.

1.) An event need not be intended as a cue to be one. If the stock market drops 1000 points in a single day, a lot of people take that as at least a cue to seriously and quickly review their stock portfolios, if not bail out of the market completely. Yet no one intentionally established that stock market loss as a purposeful cue to do so. The increase in minimum checkout balance at RPGnow is the same sort of incident. Also, there is a thread on the rpgnow forums that does discuss the minimum balance and what vendors should do. In that thread, James did tell vendors to raise their $5.00 prices if it was a justifiable for reasons other than the checkout minimum increase.

2.) Second, the process of creation for a free fanzine using free contributions is significantly different from the process of developing, producing, and distributing a for-profit gaming product, if only for the fact that there are no financial considerations to be made while producing the fanzine. Production of materials for free consumer distribution doesn't bear a lot of similarity to the production of materials for consumer resale, since you don't have to worry about money. The only way I envision for you to have any similar experience is if you're one of the people running The Brood rather than being a creative contributor.

 

[jmucchiello]

I have to concur. The raise of the minimum does not necessitate a raise of the vendor prices. Vendors that do raise prices won't be hitting my "favored" list and I'll still go for great deals offered by RPGO and other quality vendors.

Conveniently, my prices were already higher than the minimum so I didn't care when the minimum was raised. There is a theory that RPGs are massively underpriced. So I took that theory with a grain of salt and avoided the $5 price point when pricing my PDFs. If you can't get up to $6.95 or $7.95 for a PDF price, well, I'm sorry you don't want my PDFs but that's their price.