I once worked for a website that sold gaming supplies.
They started as a forum and went into selling. How they made it work:
- Found a Niche within the market (Single cards and unique supplies)
- Created partnerships with other small vendors with inventory and re - sold on their site with profit sharing.
- Leveraged free resources such as a forum to become an authority in the niche.
- Had a plethora of 'how to' guides for new people playing the Game.
- Strategy guides featuring products they sold.
- Hired people to create 'budget guides' for people which combined products which were cheap (Under 100) and had a huge mark up.
- Social sharing and forums sharing where the audience would reside.
Apart from the IM and SEO issues with your site preventing it from success, you have a cookie cutter theme, a massive inventory, no added value to an over saturated niche and no unique selling point. You are selling products people can get at the local Walmart. You need to provide value or undercut prices. If you already bought inventory, knowing your niche, I bet you paid the bulk vendor prices so you have a little bit of room to profit. But you are still selling the margins too high. Some products you make money, others you can't because your competition does not to draw in visitors.
Some easy incentives you can offer for people to buy in your niche:
- Buy $XX get a free booster pack
- Free Shipping on orders of $XXX
- Ect
This is how a lot of businesses do it in your niche. You need to go into Social Media and find the facebook groups which discuss the games you sell. You can find them on Reddit, Youtube Comments, Facebook primarily.
The MTG, a lot of adults play the Game and spend the money. You are going after a niche which has played the game a long time, have relationships with actual physical businesses and already have a preferred website to buy from. You need to steal clients by offering value or most beneficial cheaper. This is a game with a lot of big spenders but they are older.
For other games, you are dealing with kids and parents. You need to convince parents to shop from you. Think soccer moms and divorced dads. Busy. Not a lot of time. You need to get their attention. Considering I know your niche and worked in it for a few years, I can rudely and plainly tell you this:
1. Your competition spends a LOT of money to provide value to the niche and retain clients.
2. Your competition has a BIG MARKETING budget.
3. Your competition has a history with their customers.
4. Your competition sells nearly every product cheaper.
5. Your competition has a larger and more diverse inventory.
6. Your competition consists of trusted brands.
7. Your competition 'has a staff' of up to a hundred and are real businesses with a warehouse, full staff, and buys every product cheaper than you do and can sell it cheaper than you can while still making a profit.
Honestly, your niche is harder online than it would be to open a store. As far as the internet marketing issues, you can turn this around if you have the resources to fight it out and stick around for a few months.
I would suggest:
1. Mapping out product releases.
2. Creating informational pages about them on your site.
3. Rank those new pages.
4. When the product goes live, change the ranked page to the new product.
A lot of vendors offer pre - sale of items as soon as the information is leaked from the vendor. This means they have the page ready to go live before that. Not many vendors offer 'Rumored' or the Japanese released information. You can rank for the Japanese name, or the rumored set or product name before it comes out fairly easily and get residual converting traffic.
With your niche, this is the tip of the iceberg. You need to be ahead of the curve, sell everything cheaper, sell things other people do not, and have heavy social media interaction to build trust. This is not a niche you dive into. This is because of the competition. I would cut my losses now. I know the niche and can tell you are not ready for it. You are fighting against a group of buyers who are educated on the products, shop around, and have a high level of established trust with their vendors. Before buying inventory you should know which product will move because you know the market well enough.
Bottom line is this:
If you knew the niche, you would know this would be hard and expensive to make a dent. If you did your homework you would have promoted heavily and built trust with the industry before you paid for inventory. To get SEO traffic you are fighting big budgets. To get referral, direct, forum or social media traffic you need to build trust with your clients.
A side note, you can throw a life vest on your business with Facebook ads. You can easily scrap the Facebook email ids of users who already are active in or on existing gaming websites fan pages or groups and create targeted and cheap ads to your client base. It is the least expensive way for you to get to your audience. With proper split testing and promotional offers you can actually make some money to at least sell your inventory. Good luck.
