Tony_Amazon: Any other thoughts on how we might do a better job reaching people like you who perceive our sales as recycled or only featuring THQ stuff?
Cheers,
Tony
orcishgamer: I usually only figure out what the upcoming ones are from posts here (can never find that bloody cheapassgamer one). I have deep links to all your normal pages that would list sales or at least a side bar item for a sale, that's fine, of course, for those that visit religiously. I guess really the question becomes, how soon do you want to inform folks of said sales? Are you willing to add a "Coming Next Week" sidebar, or similar, to the This Week's Deals page?
Also, I will say this, you need to improve your pages, it's really hard to find DLC for said titles, even though you sometimes sell it. There needs to be a quick link to it so we can grab it along the way, using the search for it sucks (ideally I should be able to add the game and all DLC with one click). Also if DLC is included there's only about a 75% chance the game page mentions it. Finally, you don't offer some DLC, for example Treasures of the Sun doesn't appear to be available even though Dungeon Siege III is. Perhaps you could mention that to prevent frustration (maybe do like the, Notify This Author for books that have no Kindle edition).
But I'm interested in hearing how Amazon.com wants to communicate their sales, I may actually have some suggestions depending on what your strategy is.
That "coming next week" link is an interesting concept...I'm going to kick it around with our merchandising team and figure out how we can execute against that.
Also, on DLC...no one agrees with you more than me. I have weekly meetings with our design/engineering team to fix this and I'm hoping we have an elegant solution in place within the next 6 months or so (changing product pages on a site as big as Amazon is a process).
As for how we want to communicate...its the wild west right now :). I'm doing a lot of community building (or trying to) on Reddit, CAG, and Neogaf. We do a lot of email marketing to past purchasers, as well as social media (Facebook/Twitter) and a good amount of PR (we're in Kotaku's weekly deal posts and Joystiq usually picks our stuff up).
Fire away with suggestions :). Sorry it took so long for me to respond, I've been buried in the MAYhem sale.
I'll be responding to the other posts today as well.
Cheers,
Tony
Artki: > I can tell you that continuing to add selection is a major focus for us, and we are doing so at full capacity. Our QA/Ingestion team (the guys who put stuff up on the site) are a top notch crew that work crazy hours to get more stuff up for sale,
If you're working so hard, consider looking at snagging Dungeon Siege 2 (and expansion) as a downloadable (that doesn't require the purchase of DS 3). DS 1 would be nice but I have that so its not an issue.
We have not only considered it but it is one of our top priorities. The way I understand it, these games have some really complex licensing agreements in place so we're trying to run down who we actually need to work with to distribute the products.
Cheers,
Tony
SimonG: Amazon is bound by legal reasons to not release their digital content outside the US. That is also why they only do the minimal requirements of checking if you are actually a US customer. They want your money, but they can't ask for it officially. One of the reasons they are that cheap is probably because they only "buy" US licenses for their DD catalogue.
If you want to blame somebody, blame the legal and licensing of the publishers.
amok: I generally blame the lot of them.... I am good at distributing blame.
As a customer, the only thing I know is that they are not able to make me a customer without being fraudulent. I do not really care much who to blame, but it is their shop, they are advertising this global (intentional or not). It might be because they are only dealing with US licenses, but as long as they (Amazon) do not manage to make some fixes (i.e. sorting things out legally with publishers) I give my money to those who have managed to do so...
It is really no big deal for me, I tend to get the games I want for a price I find reasonable, but it irks me a little that that Tony_Amazon comes to a forum of a Polish based company (servers in Malta?) and speaks to "you all" when it is not legally locally to buy the products he is talking about.
I just wanted to comment on "but it irks me a little that that Tony_Amazon comes to a forum of a Polish based company (servers in Malta?) and speaks to "you all" when it is not legally locally to buy the products he is talking about."
The only reason I popped over here to comment was to address the fact that it seemed to have trouble finding our deals. I wanted to address this.
Sorry if it came across as me trying to advertise to you, this was not my intention, and the recent posts make it clear that input/feedback/interaction with me on this forum is not something the userbase is interested in. I apologize again for the intrusion, if anyone has any questions for me moving forward feel free to reach out to me on CAG:
http://www.cheapassgamer.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9464094#post9464094 via PM or post in that thread and I'll answer them.
Again, really sorry for the intrusion, it was in no way my intention to offer offense.
Cheers,
Tony