Fair Play Games ends "Indie Designers Program"

Perhaps you meant "amenable" to working with indie designers? Susceptible suggests that we're trying to hoodwink him!

(just giving you a hard time on a Monday morning...)

-Jeff

Well, I for one, would certainly encourage an initiative like yours. So if nobody screams murder for stealing their idea I would go for it. I'm quite interested in the setup. Why would it be bad for two persons (or even more) to make a web store just to sell indie board games. I think there's no harm in it, especially if you help eachother out. In my opinion there's more to be gained from cooperating than from opposing eachother.

Please let us know when you get this up and running. I will be glad to link to you from my web site and point your site out to anyone and everyone i know who plays games.

P.S. Will you sell on a consignment basis?

I've started adding logic to the site.

You can now submit games and they will show up in the category lists.

There is no detailed page view yet, but that's what I plan to work on tomorrow.

Feel free to add some games to the site (I can use the test data), but don't put a lot of effort into posting your game. This data won't be copied to the final site.

The live site won't allow people to submit games right onto the site for obvious reasons.

Jason

This is a good idea that I've been considering. A problem that I'm not a complete authority on what makes a good game. For example, I like the Kosmos 2-player series, and I have about 8 of them, but I hate Lost Cities, so I probably would have thought it's not worth trying to sell. But Lost Cities is one of the more popular games in the series.

Overall, I do like the idea though.

I always thought the store was out the money for their demo copies, not the publisher. Anyway, it does seem like it would discourage people from selling through me if I demand a free copy of each item.

Exactly.

The combined shipping is more powerful than it seems. I just got WarCraft from funagain. It was $32, and I ended up spending well over $100 just to take advantage of combined shipping. I think it's quite likely a customer will find something they just have to have and then if they can combine shipping they'll add a few more items.

I did say I would consider giving the designers a choice of doing it both ways. Either they pay a fairly small amount as a monthly fee and then I direct the orders to them or they pay what works out to a much larger percentage for me to take care of everything. A game that only sells a few copies a month would be better (for the designer) to be by consignment.

The problem with personal websites is getting people to be aware of them, and that's what I'm trying to address.

Thanks for your comments. It's good to know I have support from people here.

Jason

I don't think publishers eat the cost of demo games at some level because there are a lot of stores, meaning lots of demo copies. I wonder if it was one site if it would be more palatable to the indie designer. The problem would be 'bad' reviews. If you took a free game of say Lost Cities(example because you said you didnt like it) and decided to review it, then you might get an angry supplier/designer. Maybe it won't work, but it could be an interesting idea. Especially if you had the time/interest and somehow sold the idea of it as a way to get independant playtesting. I dunno. Random ideas before breakfast.

Andy

As for quality of games:

Require the designers to submit pictures of the game that they will be selling as well as either a snipit of the rules or the entire rulebook. I think you can get a very good idea of the quality of the game just by looking at these two items. In reality, you wouldn't be concerned with how fun the game was, as you stated that's entirely subjective. What you are really concerned about is the quality of the components and how professionally the game is presented. It's not up to you to be the game police. There are plenty of games on the shelves of Walmart that suck but they are still selling and they still look nice. Your main interest is to protect the consumer from inferior quality products and protect the site's reputation for selling quality games. Also I would encourage the designers to submit their games to Board Game Geek and include a link to the Geek listing of their game. It would be a good idea for the designers to ask people who have played the game to login to geek and rate/review/comment on it. All of the good Internet game stores take advantage of this feature.

As for consignment versus direct ship: I for one would be hesitant to keep anything 'in stock' and then ship the items from your own location. There are a couple of reasons for this: First, the item will have to be shipped twice; once to you from the designer and once from you to the consumer. Yes this is pretty much the industry standard but at this level, I think any cut in costs will prove benificial. Any games that are self produced (for example, Brykovian's Castle Danger) are very costly and very little profit is made. Any cut in costs will go a long way towards making the game feasible to sell. Second, unless you have a basement with a lot of space, and a lot of extra free time, then it's probably not practical for you (assuming one day the volume of sales from the site reach a decent level). Even if you sell only 5 games a week, you have to consider how long it will take to package the items and the trips to the post office (but if you do go this route, I recommend a once a week shipping schedule, I.E. all games ship on Saturday no matter which day of the week they were ordered on).

What you may want to do is sell things on Escrow. Basically setup a paypal account, when someone purchases something the money goes to you. You send the e-mail to the designer confirming you received the the funds, the designer ships the item with delivery confirmation. As soon as the game is delivered, fire off an e-mail to the buyer stating the game was delivered. Wait a few days, if no problems then deposit the money into the designers account. It's safe for all parties involved and you don't have to stock/ship anything. You might even want to do this for only the first few times for a new designer. After they have established they are trustworthy, then you allow them to recieve payments directly from the customers.

That's all the thoughts I have now. Again, I look forward to helping you out in any means possible with this project.
-Darke

A marketplace is a lot safer. No combined shipping, but you run much less risk of having the whole store look bad because of one failed sale. You'd need to charge a periodic "listing fee" in the case of a marketplace, I'd think.

-- Matthew

As was suggested, I could simply email you that someone ordered it and what their shipping address is and send the money through paypal.

That is a good arguement for just doing one method, and based on the other comments on this thread, it sounds like I'm slightly better off going with the designer ships method.

Both methods have a lot of pros and cons that have been mentioned, but it seems like the big ones are the reliability of sellers if it's not on consignment vs the extra liability, storage space, tax issues, and shipping costs if I do it by consignment.

I would use paypal for that. They even have a fairly basic shopping cart web ap that looks like it can do the job. I'm using it to sell T-Shirts on my ProfQuotes web site and that works quite well, though with only a single item, I don't use many shopping cart features.

The tax software I use has small business features (which I've never used), but it seems to just be plug in the numbers and it creates the forms.

Insurance is a good point, and likely not possible for a website generating a few dollars a month. What do indie designers who sell games on their own sites do about the possibility of being sued?

I'd thought of using a link to BGG if there was already a listing there. I didn't know you could submit your own listings. So far, I just lurk there and I haven't created an accout.

I think it would be around $10 to ship 5 copies depending on how big the game is, so it would basically add $2 to the selling price (or more to the point, decrease the designer's income by $2/copy). This could be a major issue for designers.

The key to your second issue is I have to charge enough to make it practical for me. Normal retail markup is 50% of the retail price. To make it practical (and cover paypal/webhosting fees), I might have to charge 30-40%. So if I sell it for $20, the designer would get $12-$14. I don't know if this would be reasonable for the designer.

This is the other end of the Consignment spectrum. Since it's a lot easier for me, it might be the direction to go to start. Once it's established, I can expand into more of a store.

The marketplace idea does raise a question of fees. What is a reasonable monthly listing fee to charge the designers? At the beginning I'll have very few customers, so I can't really charge anything. If it's free for the first 6 months, then I decide I've got enough customers and introduce a $10 or $20/month fee, that could put off a lot of designers. I'd also want to charge a lot less for bgdf members, but I wouldn't want to get into a situation where people just sign up here for the listing discount.

If I charge 30% of the selling price on a consignment basis, it doesn't really matter if I sell 1 copy or 50, the designer is still getting the same value, so it's reasonable to start with that fee because if I don't have enough customers to sell any games, it doesn't cost the designers anything except their consignment copies sitting in my closet for another month.

I thought it was the other way around. If I'm only listing games I physically have, and I'm responsible for shipping, there shouldn't be any failed sales making the site look bad.

If it's a market place, failed sales could lead to the reputation that it's hit or miss depending on what kind of designer you get.

What if you have a page on my site with your game description and a "buy" button that takes the person to paypal and fills in all the information. They just have to click "pay" and the money is transfered from them directly to you and you get an email from paypal with their shipping address?

Jason

Once the DNS propagates (which will take about 24 hours), the independant game store will be live at indieboardgames.com.

Sorry if this posting isn't clear or sounds abrupt, it's 2:30 in the morning and I've been working on the site for several hours. I'm just anxious to get the ball rolling. It's a lot of fun seeing the site take shape :).

If you want your game listed, please send an email to me at ibg-submission@profquotes.com (The way I set up the domain name I don't get any email addresses).

Clearly state the game's title, the designer's name, the number of players, estimated game length, target age range, and the retail price. Also tell me which category in which you want the game listed. So far, I have Strategy Games, Classic Games, Party Games, and Family games. I'm open to new categories as well.

Then include the description of your game for the detail page. HTML formatting is welcome.

For now there's no submission guidelines. I plan to add them soon. The games should be professionally made; at least cheapass quality.

Once I have 10 or so games listed I'll start trying to get visitors. Is the BGG text ad worthwhile?

Eventually (but almost certainly not for the next few months) there will be listing fees. Based on what people have said here, I might also want to ask for review copies of the games.

Of course comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Jason

For the time being it will just be a listing either linking to the designers website or acting as the designers website if they don't have one.

That might change as the site grows if there's enough demand for me to sell directly.

That's a good idea, and I will add it before it becomes necessary. For now, I'd rather get the site going sooner instead of spending a few weeks writing features that aren't needed quite yet.

Darke suggests I just make all the info avaialble as an XML file so the users can do their own searches.

Jason