Getting Competitive

I know we’re not going to be able to stand toe to toe with the big bad gaming websites. We just do not have the resources…there are only two of us. However, I’m leveraging my knowledge of games, business and web experience, and passion for this project. Wendy, in her natural role as a woman for the people, will head customer support, packing, shipping, and working with distributors. I’d call that a lean team. With Social Media as a friend we will be able to reach more people to tout the unique features of our business – like developing our miniatures. We’re going to record game nights, and gaming how-to sessions on YouTube. Obviously I will keep on blogging, and I may work a vblog into the routine…I’ve been checking out the Facebook video options and it might be the way to go. In any case, there’s still room out there for someone looking to grab a piece of a corner of the available market. In order to remain at least competitive, however, we’ll need more than drive – we’ll need customers. So, over the last few days I’ve been looking at a slew of gaming focused websites and have decided to implement some customer friendly features. The obvious ones are free shipping on $100 orders and a loyalty point system – which were dropped in and tested today. I’ve also included a wishlist, so people can tag things to come back to later. While setting these up I also validated tax is working correctly. You may know, or maybe not, but the tax for Madison county is on top of the Alabama state tax. (as a side note, yay…or boo… I am now completely set up with all applicable tax law) So, those ordering from our home base in Huntsville will have to pay more tax than those ordering from another state, or even further away in Alabama. I may think of some creative ways to reward local customers, but state and local taxes will still apply to everything I sell, so it would come right out of profit. I’ll let it ride for now, but I’ll think of something. The most challenging aspect of all of that work was…the social media links. My goodness, I spent hours and hours trying to get it to work, but the way my current plugin is designed they wanted more money for an easy solution (basically a social media plugin). Not on my watch…so I research, tested, experimented and finally was able to wrestle the social media links into place. Kind of funny the way these things turn out, but another good day in business prep, and I’ll take it.