So I was wondering, in an anecdotal fashion, after a few months of operation, how people were finding the Un-Store in practice?
I have had a sale through the Un-Store myself, but I have no way of telling if it is a sale I might have had direct through my website or not. I know that there is more to the Un-Store concept than extra sales of course :)
I'm curious too.
My own sales are down from what they were at IPR, which I expected, but still comfortably brisk, which I also expected. I'm very curious about others'.
-Vincent
Hey,
I've had a few sales (less than 4, more than 0 -- exact numbers are spotty) through the UnStore. That's not much until you consider the entire print run for Black Cadillacs was 50 books, and only 20 or so were left after GenCon.
Cheers,
D
I've had three or four sales of Play Unsafe, split between print and PDF.
It's also available on IPR, where it's sold many more in the same time period: the exact number is over 100, but you can't really compare the two, since Play Unsafe debuted on IPR during that time period.
On Lulu, it's also sold three or four copies.
Graham
Hello,
I've been selling bushels. As in, book after book, all the time. If not every day, then at least several a week.
Whether my website (sadly un-updated as it is) is involved, I don't know, as the buy-buttons there are the same as the ones at the un-store.
Best, Ron
Whereas I don't believe that I've got a single sale through the un-store.
I also have not had any sales through the Un-store.
I've sold four copies of the Rustbelt ashcan through the UnStore.
Between GenCon and the start of the UnStore, I sold four copies through direct email interaction with folks. And also some others face-to-face that I can't keep track of for shit.
At GenCon, it sold a total of six or seven, I forget which.
I'm not sure? My un-store sales look exactly like the sales from my own site, and I'm not really making an effort to tell them apart. At a guess I'd say I've sold maybe 20 Sea Dracula and 10 Panty Explosion since they've been available on the un-store. That's between the store and my own site. That's a definite increase over previous months, especially since I'm not promoting either game at all. I'd guess that maybe 30% of those sales came from the un-store. That sounds about right to me.
I suspect that if I was actively promoting eitehr game I'd be seeing much higher sales through the site. Last time I did a push for Panty Explosion I saw a really big sales jump through my own site, and smaller jumps at IPR, Key 20, e23 and RPGNOW.
Ron, given you're selling lots of stuff, are you as excited about selling books via the Unstore as you were when it started?
Not an idle question: I'm genuinely interested if the enthusiasm persists.
Graham
Haven't sold any copies of Dread (Pandemonium) yet. Been about a month. Figure it'll pick up.
Hey Rafael,
I'm not sure why, but Dread doesn't show up on the main "browse" page (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/games/unstore/browse). It does show up on the "games in print" page, though, and Neoplastic Press shows up on the "browse the publishers" page.
(Oops! I know why. I'll fix it.)
-Vincent
A little advice for the store maintainer:
- Put some really obvious link on the Forge site for the unstore. I wouldn't even know about the unstore if it weren't for this thread.
- Put pricing on the games. I have to click the Purchase link to find out the price, which isn't a solid plan from a marketing perspective.
- Consider categorizing things by genre or some other means on the browse page. Otherwise I'm just confronted with a block of cool little pictures, which isn't very useful.
Quote from: Clay on March 09, 2009, 02:39:53 PM
- Consider categorizing things by genre or some other means on the browse page. Otherwise I'm just confronted with a block of cool little pictures, which isn't very useful.
I'd personally rather not see genre categories, especially since very few games on the store fit into any specific genre, or share their genre with another game. I also really like the page of little pictures. It's very visually cool. It invites me to explore and find out what each picture represents, instead of dismissing the games because they don't fit into a genre I'm interested in.
Thanks, Clay and Jake! No need to debate it here. If anybody has any requests about the Un-store, please send them to me directly, at lumpley at the gmail.com.
(The individual publishers are responsible for putting prices on their products, but the back end may be a little confusing in that regard, so don't blame them. I have a plan to make it tidier.)
-Vincent
I would agree that genre categories are ultimately fairly unsatisfying -- speaking as someone who tries to find some best-fits for new products as they're added to the IPR catalog.
A lot of the market you're looking at here is interested in "the work of game designer X"; they come in with an intent to purchase stuff someone specific has done. The unstore's publisher's page allows that sort of exploration of the site. Which, given that the unstore has (or at least appears to have) a very thin barrier between "community of designers" and "these are our products", is probably a reasonably ideal set-up for it.
As a consumer, my only real complaint here would be the lack of an ability to achieve economies of scale: I can't order three items from the same publisher and get a combined shipping cost discount, let alone from different publishers. But before anyone gets upset about that observation, let me note that I totally get that this is the sort of thing that can't be avoided with the Unstore's model for sales -- as I recall what was said initially, there's no guarantee that each product ordered from it even goes out from the same shipper. The end effect that I would *expect* from this is that the Unstore is about selling one copy of one game to one person at a time ... is that at all fair as a statement? I'm genuinely curious and want to see how expectations and reality line up.
Given that books are often sent from the same location, there's no practical reason you couldn't order two books at once and pay once for shipping. It might be logistically difficult, from the point of view of the website and PayPal, though.
G