e-Commerce: Complete. Configured. Connected.
Posts tagged e-business
Extend Your Game’s Life Cycle
May 12th
We all know the life cycle of a casual game in the marketplace: slow sales, followed by a huge (but short-lived) spike when you are ‘discovered’ by the gamer faithful, followed by a long tail of limited sales.
Once a consumer picks your game, the chances are they’re going to go looking for one ‘like it’ more quickly than you can push out a sequel – the laws of time/space make it impossible to keep up with the voracious appetites of the gaming consumer! So, unless you can start building games at a superhuman pace, you need to either find another way of filling your product portfolio or risk losing your relationship with your customer.
That’s ultimately why large distributors like Bigfish are able to keep building a market – the consumer returns to their site and finds more offerings. Sadly for the game developer, that can mean a deep dilution of your brand, and a complete loss of a direct business relationship.
But there’s a way to avoid this: cross-marketing. Team up with another developer or two to cross-market one another’s products from your own site, ensuring there’s more to consume each time the customer returns – and that they’ll be primed and ready for your next release.
Working together, you can reduce the time it takes to grow a new title’s popularity: simply cross-market it each time a current title is purchased. You can also maintain the volume on recent (but dipping) games, by returning the favor as new blockbusters take their place at the top of the charts.
Set up a standard business relationship, where you agree a commission for each sale of one another’s titles, and then let Plimus take on the effort of distributing revenues. This is found money for the most part – or at least money that would otherwise go to a distributor and can now be used to keep the quality of new games up.
Jason Kiwaluk
Sales Director, North America
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilovemypit/2267178231/
New Network Sales Model Changes the Online Sales Game
May 5th
Traditionally, online sellers have fit into one of two models. Either they are a pure retailer, selling other companies’ products at a mark-up. Or they are a ‘factory outlet store’, selling their own products and services direct to consumers.
The second – the factory outlet stores – are leaving literally millions of dollars on the table.
Do the math. A merchant that has one product to sell, at $40 a pop and a goal of selling fifty thousand units next year has put an artificial cap of $2 million in revenue on their business. And once a buyer has put their trust in the merchant, there is nothing more to sell them – that business relationship is valueless.
To understand how much profit is being left on the table, first cast your mind back to the last time you reached the check-out at a grocery store. You’ll recall that the space around the check-out is densely packed with impulse-buy items: packs of gum, gift cards for iTunes, magazines and more. Each of these items represents a high-margin opportunity to add to your eventual bill. And that space is actually bought for the most part by the products’ manufacturers – because they know that once you have your wallet open, you’re highly likely to add another item to your basket.
Now imagine an online buyer purchasing your $40 software package. They would be more than happy to add an impulse-buy item, if you offered them one. Maybe a casual game at $9.95, a support package for $14.95, even a PC Accelerator for $20. If you could take a 30% to 40% revenue share on selling these items, your business’ revenue could increase by as much as 20% – without the need to invest in building new software.
And now imagine running a monthly newsletter to each of your buyers offering a ‘special deal’ on another partner’s product with another 40% revenue share on, let’s say, a $40 item. Assume you have a user base of fifty thousand, and a conversion ratio of just 1% – that would mean you could look forward to 500 sales per month, or six thousand per year at $16 revenue each. Combined with the promotions you offered in the purchase process, you’ve now increased your revenue potential by a full 25%.
The really good news is that you can do this right now, without any financial investment, by using the Plimus e-Business platform. With your own account in place to take care of the e-commerce for your own products, you can swiftly agree to re-sale deals with companies like Namco, Avanquest, Surf Secret and literally thousands more. And of course, you can seek partners who will re-sell your products on a revenue share basis, increasing your audience size.
Plimus merchants are seeing initial invoice sizes as much as 43% higher using Network Sales, increasing their revenues and helping them build a sustainable business for the future.
Simon Jones
VP of Strategic Solutions
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elvissa/823054325/
I Blog Therefore I Am?
Mar 26th
Welcome to the Plimus e-Business Blog. Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your valuable day to read about what we have to say. Hopefully, it will provoke some thoughts and new ideas about how you think about e-Business and e-Commerce. Perhaps what we write will stir you to respond. That is, after all, the purpose of a blog – to stir discussion and put some thought-provoking ideas out there for you to ponder. Maybe if we are creative enough, we just might make you smile or laugh. After all, we like to think of ourselves as a serious but fun-loving group here at Plimus. In any case, why this blog? I read somewhere recently that there are over 60 million blogs in existence, and that gave us pause here at Plimus on being clear about why to launch yet another.
In my early Internet days, I used to think that people wrote blogs, articles, newsletters, etc, out of the goodness of their hearts in order to share their wonderful experiences with the rest of us. While some actually do this, I find the vast majority have some ulterior motive. I suppose we have one too. In the spirit of transparency – our motive is fairly simple. We believe we have some unique perspectives on e-Business and e-Commence that have come from partnering with our customers. And we want to share them, talk about them, get your thoughts, and learn and grow together.
Founded in 2001, Plimus grew up in the Internet age, and as our customers grew so have we. The number is continually growing but currently 5,000 e-Commerce vendors and over 50,000 affiliates rely on Plimus as their e-Business platform. That gives us a unique view of e-Commerce including Financial Management, Copy Protection, Entitlement Management, Traffic Generation, Tracking, Customer Management, Marketing, Promotions, Catalog, and Pricing Management. We are many voices here at Plimus, so there will be many contributors, and we think this will only add to the richness of the views and content.
So, welcome! We hope you stay connected. Blog on and take charge of your e-Business destiny.
Charlie Born,
Head of Marketing
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7502393@N04/ / CC BY 2.0
