Last month, we discontinued sales of our Cherry Picked Games titles on Amazon. We know many of you shop there, but it no longer makes sense for us to use the platform. Amazon was a money sink. There were also constant disruptions that required our attention. More importantly, leaving the service better aligns with our values: support small and independent businesses, price products to deliver fair value to both the consumer and developer, and maintain our voice while sharing our games. We’ll go into the history and reasons below the fold, but know that CPG still has their games available on our site and through distributors around the world.
If you’re an indie game developer, you know the challenges of getting your games in front of people. Amazon is an attractive option to share find players through the world’s biggest sales platform. I want to share my experience to help inform your choice. Some of this may come across as petty and personal, but I assure you it felt personal at times. All the interactions with Amazon made it clear I was not a person, but rather a dollar-value cell in a spreadsheet. Amazon also has a reputation for destroying small businesses, and that also felt, at times, like an active effort against CPG. Amazon is a company with the resources to make anything happen and they choose to give you a terrible experience.
Our first exposure to selling through Amazon was a service called Vendor Express. We were approached by a sales rep who wanted to put our new-at-the-time game Drink! in a program called Launchpad. It was designed to help crowdfunded products enter the Amazon sales ecosystem. Through Vendor Express, Amazon would order cases of games from us at wholesale prices and resell them. Through Launchpad, our games were promoted in the search results. The best part was that there were no fees, aside from ads (we’ll get more into ads later). So far, so good.
The following year, Amazon changed one of the requirements for Launchpad: any products would need at least 10 reviews with a high review score. It was at this time we asked our backers and fans to rate and review Catalyst, Drink!, and Conspire. We provided no motivation other than the inherent joy of sharing their thoughts about a game they enjoyed. We successfully reached the minimum review count. About one month later, those reviews were summarily deleted without notification (we just happened to notice our review count plummeted) and our pages now required verified sale reviews (only Amazon buyers could review the games). Every attempt to find out what happened was met with silence. With our pages now suppressed in search results, getting organic sales (and, hopefully, verified reviews) became difficult.
The Vendor Express program ended shortly afterwards. To continue selling on Amazon, we had to switch to a professional seller account on Seller Central. This had a monthly fee, in addition to fulfillment fees, storage fees, per-item sales fees, and labeling fees. Needless to say, these make the margins on a $15 game like Conspire really small. Of course, we could rarely sell for MSRP, as other companies that had our games would engage in bidding wars, sometimes using scripts to lower the prices of their versions to pennies below ours. The worst part was that these other retailers didn’t use Fulfillment by Amazon, so they had high shipping costs and rarely moved copies.
During this time, we had several issues with our Amazon service. The transition to Seller Central took several months because none of our credit cards were accepted. Some flag had been placed on my name and business name that they eventually turned off. Our Conspire listing was deactivated right before Cyber Monday. Because we were never notified, we paid a lot in ads to send people to a dead page. We spent a whole month getting that listing back and were never told what the problem was (they claimed it was against policy to notify us why our game could not be sold under “Toys & Games”, even though we eventually got the same game relisted there). We had a Drink! ad campaign stop producing impressions for two months (that was just weird). Finally, CPG had to pay for every product refund for customers, regardless of the reason (we even had to pay for a copy Amazon destroyed at its warehouse).
I should also mention that there’s no way to contact a human for support through Seller Central. The “Contact Us” button links to the Seller FAQ. The only way I ever figured out how to start a support case was to tag them on Twitter and get an ever-changing link from the poor social media person who has to respond to my frustration.
For all the hassle, we were actually selling games through Amazon. People bought a few copies a week. However, they only found the pages through ads. Between the fees and ad costs, we lost money every month. Every game sold cost us between one and four bucks. Our hope was that the viral nature of games would help sales and awareness, but that never panned out. There’s also no way to realistically scale ad bids for lower cost products. If you bid on “RPG”, you’re up against Wizards of the Coast. Even if that budget playing field was even, a more expensive game can justify spending more on ads. Paying $1 per click for a $15 game with $6 of fees only gives you a couple looks before someone has to buy.
The final straw was with the Catalyst page. Amazon changed a backend setting than truncated the text in our bullet-points. It made the description look awful (as missing parts of words and sentences tend to do). We submitted changes repeatedly, but they were never accepted. I was even told the game’s box and sell sheet were not sufficient evidence to allow changes to a page (that I created).
Once the last few copies of Catalyst and Conspire sold, we started decommissioning that Amazon account. It’s a relief knowing we don’t have to check those pages anymore. We’re a tiny company who all have full-time jobs elsewhere. It was amazing how much effort it took to lose money selling through Amazon.
The thing is, I never wanted people to buy anything off of Amazon. We were there because people expect to find everything there. When I talked to a random person and they found out I make board games, the second question would be “Do you sell them on Amazon?” It’s hard to blame people for shopping there either; everything’s cheaper and the shipping is free. Those costs come out of the people working for Amazon. The sellers, the small businesses, the warehouse workers, and the delivery drivers all pay the difference.
--Alex