With thousands of new games released every year and thousands more reprinted, distributors simply don’t have the sales capacity and warehouse space to pick up every game from every publisher to sell to retailers. This leaves smaller and newer publishers in a difficult situation: They can sell on their own webstores, but they lose out on the reach of both online and brick-and-mortar retailers.
I had no idea a solution was in the works until I listened to episode 138 of the Crowdfunding Nerds podcast featuring Brendan McCaskell of Open Owl Studios. Faced with this problem, Brendan created a solution for his company, and he made the generous choice to open his platform to other publishers also looking for a solution.
In FLGstore.com, Brendan has created a place for publishers to list their products on a retailer-focused platform (only retailers can purchase these products at these prices). The goal is consolidation; sure, retailers could go to each publisher’s website to purchase games, but that takes time. The more products are all in one place, the better for retailers.
I reached out to Brendan to take a peek under the hood, and he was kind to answer with two sets of clarifications (one for publishers, one for retailers):
For the publishers:
- They sign up and list their games at whatever price and quantity breaks they like. They can sell 1 game for 20% off MSRP and 4 games for 50% MSRP – up to them.
- Currently, all shipping charges are built INTO the price the available game.
- Publishers can also list pre-orders, allowing them to ask for a small deposit and the final amount upon fulfillment (or at whatever date). We are also allowing publishers to issue a second invoice for shipping with pre-orders as shipping prices change.
- All publishers are currently asked to take care of their own fulfillment.
For the retailers:
- They can put any combination of available games into their cart and checkout at once. This will act a little bit like Amazon FBA where each publisher will ship their games separately to retailers.
- Currently retailers cannot mix pre-orders and available games in the same order.
- Only shipping in the US is open right now.
These answers cleared up the big question I had: In the spirit of consolidation, it’s the most efficient if these products all ship from the same fulfillment center (just as a distributor consolidates a retailer’s order of a lot of different games from various publishers into a single order). But that’s a big logistical jump; the easiest starting point is what Brendan has implemented: Publishers must ship their own games to retailers, thereby including the shipping fees in the listed price on FLGstore.com.
This endeavor is very new, but Brendan is a really sharp guy, and I think this has great potential. Also, because publishers don’t need to physically move inventory to list their games on the platform, as long as you do the math right (and don’t violate any agreements you may already have with distributors), I don’t think there’s anything to lose in trying it. At the very least, it’s something you have control over if you aren’t hearing back from distributors.
I’d love to hear from publishers or retailers who are using FLGstore or who are curious to use it. I’ll alert Brendan to questions posed in the comments so he has the chance to respond.
Update: I learned that Quartermaster is doing something along these lines too called QM Direct. Here are details provided by QM Direct:
We offer free shipping on orders over $350 and that has been pretty important for the retailers that order from us. [Retailers] usually only order 1 or 2 copies at a time, so it has been important to have a larger catalog of games to order from so that retailers can reach that free shipping threshold. They did not want to absorb the shipping cost to buy from us vs. just buying games from their main distributors and getting free shipping.
Our experience has also been that some retailers are ordering products that haven’t been stocked or restocked by their main distributor. So they are purchasing products that might be hard to find at their distributor because it might be a slow seller for their distributor but still a good seller for that particular retailer.
Another Update: There is a company doing something similar in Europe. Here are details provided by Meeples Distribution:
At Meeples Distribution we have combined fulfilment with distribution to both consumers and business within the whole EU. This means that an publisher can sell to whoever he/she/it wants and only has to pay for the fulfillment costs.
At the same time, we at Meeples will sell their products to our B2B partners in Europe and to consumers. If we sell the publishers product, we will pay the publisher an agreed upon buy-in price. This way the stock of the publisher always keeps moving and on top of this we always arrange stock movement to conventions as well.
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25 Comments on “What If Distributors Won’t Pick Up Your Game?”
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I haven’t been able to access the flgstore.com website for the last month or so since I found this article. It doesn’t seem to exist anymore, is this right?
Indeed, it doesn’t seem to be available.
Hi everyone, I’m James Takenaka, Director of Sales for Quartermaster Direct. I’d be very interested to hear from retailers who are using flgstore.com to see how this works for them.
We offer free shipping on orders over $350 and that has been pretty important for the retailers that order from us. For my experience in trying to sell direct to retailers they usually only order 1 or 2 copies at a time so it has been important to have a larger catalog of games to order from so that retailers can reach that free shipping threshold. They did not want to absorb the shipping cost to buy from us vs. just buying games from their main distributors and getting free shipping.
Our experience has also been that some retailers are ordering products that haven’t been stocked or restocked by their main distributor. So they are purchasing products that might be hard to find at their distributor because it might be a slow seller for their distributor but still a good seller for that particular retailer.
So I am interested to see how big this can get and also how many retailers are able to absorb the shipping costs in their purchases. Thanks for sharing this topic.
Thanks so much for sharing about QM Direct, James! I’ll add some of this to the text of the post above, and I appreciate your creativity and action in addressing this issue.
Hi Jamey,
What an amazing article! One of our clients sended it to us because we are actually doing the same thing in Europe from The Netherlands.
At Meeples Distribution we have combined fulfilment with distribution to both consumers and business within the whole EU. We do this especially for the smaller publishers who would like to get an foothold in Europe.
I would be happy to tell you more about it and to explain this further.
Because the model we’ve made is perfect for smaller publishers and even indie publishers.
That’s wonderful! Can you send me a paragraph or two about it with a link, and I’ll add it to this article? I’m at jamey@stonemaiergames.com
Perfect Jamey! I have just send you an message :)
I’ve followed along with FLGStore (and got some products listed) but also as it happens I’ve been speaking with QMDirect recently.
For my small box games, with low prices, shipping to an end customer (as well as retailers) can be cheap. However, the low price means freight costs end up being a significantly higher amount per copy if not shipping in bulk. 1 pallet of Micro Dojo is about 3000 copies (and Micro Bots fits 5000 on a pallet), and shipping a half pallet or less doesn’t save that much compared to a whole one. That means committing to send a shipment to a region (e.g. the US) is either sending a smaller amount that is less likely to be profitable, or sending a huge amount and saving on the costs per unit but having a lot of tied up stock and hoping it moves in large volumes.
The consolidation model adds a lot of risk to the publisher, as the costs of the product and shipment is upfront and you have no way of knowing how successful the seller will be in shifting the stock.
QMDirect’s preorder campaign is the most exciting development for me. It helps establish the demand in advance, meaning I am not over or understocking a region, as well as letting me work out shipping costs for suitable margins. In their words, the pre-order period also is much more attractive for retailers because it lets them prepare (and/or hype) a game launch, and the limited time pre-order period adds some time pressure in the same way a Kickstarter campaign might. I’m interested to see how things go with QMDirect.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on both methods, Ben! I’d be curious to hear what you think about each of them in a few months.
Interesting to hear about this, we might sign up! We’re already using the QMDirect service for the last couple months with really good success (since they are already storing our Shivers Kickstarter games in their warehouse).
I’m glad that QM Direct is working well for you so far, Andy!
Great approach, much needed! We are now working with QM Direct and we hope it grows. I believe, it can only be successful if their catalogue is interesting enough for a big amount of retailers. So fingers crossed 🤞
I’m curious how that works out–please let me know!
Very interesting idea. Dragon Phoenix Games is ready to try this. Of course, we suspect that our tiny obscurity will still be a factor when retailers come to this site to order games. They still will not have heard of our games. But maybe this is a small step in a good direction
I hope it goes well, Carlie!
Very interesting! I saw Brendan’s post in a FB group and signed up but haven’t looked too deeply into it yet. We’re a small indie pub, but did get into distribution (finally) this year. Will have to check with the distributor/consolidator’s terms before trying, but I love the idea and fully support it!
This seems like a great idea and I hope it grows.
Daily Magic Games just recently announced that they’re moving away from traditonal distribution and now label themselves as a “boutique” publisher. They’ll use crowdfunding to only manufacture enough copies for backers plus some extra for online sales. I found it very interesting and wonder if this approach will spread to other companies.
Interesting!
Seems risky. Traditional Sales help keep cash flow when a KS hits a bump and goes over budget. There are a lot of companies crashing and failing to fulfil projects because they have no other income.
Will definitely check out FLGStore. We’re a tiny publisher and have been using Faire for wholesale orders with middling success. There’s not many retail game stores on Faire, and Faire takes a huge cut.
The Amazon FBA note was a little bit confusing to me. It sounds more like FLGStore is the opposite of FBA… each individual publisher will be responsible for fulfillment to retailers. With FBA, Amazon fulfills orders from inventory that publishers previously shipped to their warehouses.
Great post as always! Thanks for sharing.
I see what you’re saying. With Amazon FBA, you can choose between having Amazon store/ship the product or you can be responsible for that yourself (it’s the latter that Brendan is referring to).
I think the terms you meant were, Fulfilled By Merchant (FBM). Here’s a quote from Amazon explaining that approach:
“Merchant Fulfilled Network (MFN) is Amazon’s terminology for Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM). It refers to a method of selling where sellers list products in Amazon stores, but manage all storage, shipping, and customer support independently.”
Thanks James!
Hey Jamey! Thanks for highlighting FLGStore. It’s been fun to try and solve this issue and I’m optimistic about the future :)
Thanks, Brendan! I’m optimistic too. :)