If you read the newspaper or watch TV its hard to avoid all the doom and gloom right now — I must confess I do my best to avoid all depressing news (as previously mentioned). There’s a lot of talk of share markets plunging… and surging… and then plunging some more. Its depressing stuff.
There’s a lot of talk of consumers cutting back on discretionary spending — and as an e-tailer of entertainment products, that’s depressing stuff too.
So how tough are times right now?
Well, we’ve noticed five trends which highlight that times are indeed tough…
- Sales of video game consoles have slowed — as predicted the sales of big ticket items are slowing and we’ve noticed a drop in the sales of Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles.
- Downsize me – customers are spending more carefully. We’ve noticed more customers are buying the standard versions of games/movies over the Special Editions…
- Price points matter – we’re seeing uplifts in the sales for games priced under $100, while games priced at $129.95 are effectively dead ducks. Consumers are more price sensitive (meanwhile some distributors are raising prices due to the exchange rate. Hmmm?).
- More price matches – customers are more price sensitive. We’re noticing more price match requests as many people are feeling the pinch.
- People are buying entertainment for consumption at home –There was an article on Time.com which suggested that the entertainment sector doesn’t suffer like many industries do when a recession hits. We’ve noticed even in recession, our sales are growing.
Luckily for us, point 5 is enabling us to largely ignore all the gloomy talk. We set an all-time daily sales record last Wednesday and rolled out the cake (one of our traditions is that any new sales record = cake!). The good news doesn’t stop there — October 2008 smashed our all-time best month record for orders placed.
It seems that when the going gets tough… the tough still want to have some fun!
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