By: Blaze Aldrich | May 16, 2024
Elevated Board Games
I am so excited to share my experiences starting an online board game store. This includes both the ups and downs, but I wanted to share a fully transparent picture of our Journey. I will share things no store dares to share such as traffic, revenue, or the lack of.... and overall growth.
Backstory
Moving to Utah, definitely sparked my love for modern board games. My two gateway board games included Catan & Dominion. At the time, these blew my mind since I only knew of games like Monopoly & Trouble. From there, I started buying, selling, and playing games. I noticed that Out of Print games were so hard to come by and were super expensive. In addition, when I would order a board game online, shipping was slow, games would be delivered damaged, and the best prices were usually on Amazon for new games. Instead of supporting big corporations like Amazon I would shop at my local game stores. But of course, these local stores were 30-40% more expensive than online stores. I thought that was crazy because local board game stores don't have to pay shipping, as a result, we would think prices would be cheaper. Anyway, long story short, I started selling used board games as a fun little hobby. After a few months, I had the genius idea of starting an online board game store and trying to help solve some of the issues I just talked about. We have been open for almost 3 months and here is what those months looked like.
Traffic
(Wix, 2024)
March New Visitors: 2,288 | Ad Spend: $300
April New Visitors: 2,955 | Ad Spend: $200
May New Visitors: 2,424 (Estimate) | Ad Spend: $200
March: In March, the goal was to get brand recognition and try to figure everything out. This includes showing up on Google, Facebook, and optimizing our website. Optimizing the website was the main focus because we didn't want it to look like a SCAM board game website. It seems there are a ton of those popping up recently. Making our website customer-friendly and easy to navigate as also important. Most of our traffic was coming through Google & Facebook Ads.
April: We got advice to focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Basically, this means Optimizing our website so that Google can pick up our website and share it with the masses. Creating blogs and content is a huge way of doing that. Ever since then, we have tried to write 2 blogs a week that would be beneficial to gamers. Most of our ad spend was on advertising our blogs on Facebook which exponentially grew our new visitors, but no sales.
May (Now): Because of SEO and blogs, Google started showing people our website when someone searches for board games. This was amazing! Our New Visitors were growing from (FREE) Google traffic, but again sales weren't increasing. So we stopped spending money on advertising our blogs and focused on just advertising our products. Sounds like a no-brainer lol. The first two months were really to get our name out there. With a combination of SEO, blogs, & advertising our products, our sales "exploded". I say exploded because our sales doubled lol Sounds impressive right...
Google Traffic
(Google Search Console, 2024)
The purple line illustrates the growth of Google impressions over a period of time (March-Now). Impressions are when Google displays our website to people when they search for board games. Then the blue line shows how many times people clicked our website link. Our traffic is growing rapidly :)
Revenue (The Juicy Stuff)
March:
Revenue: $428
Sales: 4
Avg. Order: $107
April:
Revenue: $523
Sales: 5
Avg. Order: $105
May (Now):
Revenue: $901 | $1,800 Estimate
Sales: 11 | 22 Estimate
Avg. Order: $82
March: I don't have much to say about March haha. I was just trying to figure it out. We only had 35 games on our website.... which is nothing compared to every game store in existence. But hey! you have to start somewhere.
March Inventory: 35 Games
April: We signed deals with some board game distributors to wholesale brand-new games and focused on sharing my website in any way I could. New games don't sell as fast as used or out-of-print games surprisingly.
April Inventory: 100 Games
May: We figured out how to balance where to advertise (somewhat), buy used/ new games, and how to optimize our website. In addition, we have more inventory! Still not as much as we like but we focus on getting board games people actually want to play.
May Inventory: 200+ Games
Now What!?
Our job is to listen to our customers. Anything from how we can improve our website, improve customer experience, and provide the best prices online. Looking at these numbers may not be exciting. I mean who can pay for rent or groceries with these kinds of numbers? lol. At first glance, these numbers look abysmal. My ultimate goal is to keep growing each month and sharing our story with as many board gamers as possible. Also, this may be helpful and encouraging to others who may want to open up a board game store locally or online. I will continue to give updates on our journey so you can follow along. I plan on sharing updates every quarter, but if there is a ton of interest, I may post once a month about how well or how terrible we are doing. Either way, you'll be able to know. Feel free to ask questions below or leave a comment. Happy Gaming!
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