How many of you are tired of paying $40 per book just to keep up with our roleplaying habits?
An idea ocurred to me a while back about starting a new roleplayers wholesale club. Basically, members would buy in to the club with an initial investment. This might get them a share in the company, perhaps something like a country club.
Every year, members would pay dues to keep their membership active. I'm not exactly sure what these dues would be, if they would exist, or whether not paying them would end your membership. I like the idea of a pay-as-you-go membership, where your annual fee activats your membership for a year, then goes dormant, and if you want to use it again, you have to pay the fee for the year.
Anyway, all of this money would go toward overhead, mostly of keeping the web site online, possibly also for contributing toward shipping. Here's an idea: You might buy shipping fees for a "year", and as long as you have sufficient shipping fees in your account, you can place whatever order you want. Each order would deduct a set amount from those fees.
After your membership is current, you could shop in the online database where you would find products of the kind that usually satisfy the gamer crowd - RPGs, Anime, and Comics. All of these items would be at very discounted prices, something near wholesale.
You would select which items you wanted, and would place your order into the system. When a qualifying total dollar amount of product has been ordered, all orders would be processed. So if the qualifying amount is $300, then the system would hold all orders until there was at least $300 of product to get, then the order to the distributor would be placed. This would be based on the net price, not the retail price, if there was any difference.
The club site might also be a location for auctions for old RPG supplies or custom gamer stuff, like old books, hand-made dice bags, and fake vampire fangs. There might even be room for on-demand printing of PDF source files. This might be cool to implement through a deal with the Kinko's network, with local output and delivery.
The idea isn't so much to make money (which might be interesting, I admit), but to stop from having to pay $40 every time a new D&D book comes out. We might also be able to sample some of the other offerings out there since we're not paying so much for our core books.
This brings to mind an additional feature: We could use some of the membership fees to keep stuff "in stock". Basically, we would include extra things in our order from the distributor that would not be part of the original order. We would keep these things in stock for people to order directly from. We could also read through and write reviews for these books online, then sell them at a used price.
Everyone I talked to about the wholesale idea seemed to think it was a good one. I wonder what it would take to get this business going. I looked over a credit application at Alliance Distribution, the guys who do most of the distribution of RPGs in the US, and it didn't look too complicated, but they did insist that you be a retail store in order to place orders with them. I don't think this would be a problem if I submitted the appropriate forms to the state. In all, it could cost a couple hundred bucks, all of which I could make up with my first round of membership fees.
After the first batch of members were added, they could recruit additional members and so on. It could work in a pyramid scheme- As long as you had a certain number of paying members under you, you wouldn't have to pay your shipping dues. Just thinking aloud here.
Advertising would be pretty simple apart from the word of mouth. There are a few key sites online where gamers hang out. Several web comics and specific RPG news sites could be the target of a banner campaign. Just enough advertising could go up to bring in enough people for subsistence, then the rest could work off of referrals.
If the job of handling shipments eventually got to be a full-time job, there would be enough incoming money to support a full-time worker to handle reshipments and site maintenence.
Maybe it's all a pipe dream, but it's a pleasant one.
