In good news for sellers of gaming, electronics, books, clothing and toys/gadgets – the online store, GameSeek, has chosen the Mirakl to be a key component in its vision to build the biggest and best consumer marketplace. What this means for online retailers is another UK marketplace to sell on.
We’ve already seen sellers be successful on other UK retailer marketplaces such as Game, Halfords and Tesco. GameSeek already have traffic so there’s not reason not to expect retailers who choose to sell on their platform to also be successful.
With millions of customers and a highly engaged social network, GameSeek claim to be the number one independent online game and toy retailer in the UK. GameSeek has devised a marketplace that will allow the company to continue exciting customers with new category offerings, and grow by taking advantage of opportunities it believes other online retailers have missed.
“Taking a marketplace approach has always been in our grand plan as the way to become a central hub where consumers want to shop. We’ve been watching the market and believe we can utilise our vast experience, talents and technology in a way that is meaningful to consumers, and fair to our partners on the marketplace. Any supplier will be able to ‘win’ the Buy Box on GameSeek if they have the right offer, regardless of our own stock levels of an item. Equally, regardless of whichever supplier the customer buys from, they will earn the same points as part of a new Loyalty Scheme. We want everyone to be a winner.”
– GameSeek Founder Stephen Staley
Because a marketplace was always on the agenda for GameSeek, it was simply a case of whether to build it in-house or invest in an established platform technology. In the end, deciding to invest in established technology gave GameSeek the best value for money, with the excellent access to proven technology and expertise.
Heads up, new categories will come to GameSeek such as Sports or Hobbies & Crafts:
“We’ll be able to work with new categories that we would not have experimented with in the past such as Sports or Hobbies & Crafts, because it is will be low risk and cost for us as the retailer, while creating a new outlet for marketplace partners. Categories such as large electrical items which we could not have held stock for can now be delivered directly by the supplier once live on the store. This means we can keep our customers excited, seeing GameSeek as a place to purchase from a wide range of categories.
With these new categories giving us a low-risk way of exploring new sales streams, we feel it is important to offer the same peace-of-mind and reduced risk to our selling partners. This is why we are offering the opportunity for partners to put their products in front of millions of new people, yet charging no set-up fees or monthly membership fees. If you don’t sell, there’s nothing to pay.”
– GameSeek Founder Stephen Staley
Global expansion is also a key component of GameSeek’s future plans – the localisation features in the Mirakl Marketplace Platform and ability to rapidly scale into new territories, means the company can seize new opportunities quickly, with minimum risk for them and their partners.
7 Responses
Another marketplace site led by a retailer… Which will grow into another place where the marketplace will compete with it’s sellers. This is something we’ve seen with Amazon, Tesco and others – and it’s a model that massively benefits the marketplace rather than the seller. The whole seller owned marketplace concept is wearing thin.
We got a invite to sign up which we did of course. ‘win’ the Buy Box on GameSeek will be important as some of the other Mirkal marketplaces this is a PROBLEM and on going with them all. Fact is on one site Gameseek themselves always have the buy box and we are 25% better priced, the site is so poor to search you cannot even find us on mobile.
The decline in eBay.co.uk and the battle to bottom with Amazon has led to us really pushing a lot more offers to Mirkal markets now they are niche however. Some with more success than others. One of them has been a really good for us. However they are all the same really LOWEST price WINS.
“Global expansion is also a key component of GameSeek’s future plans” this will have to be right now looking at GAMESEEK they are only offering UK this really “limits” sales opportunities was a bit disappointed when I seen this, they do say themselves they are not fully launched, we certainly could not set any offers up manuel yesterday and they rejected all the CSV imports, we gave up in the end.
As far as competing direct with us GAMESEEK do anyway on multiple other sites, we just will not do it with their own and just will not upload offers, same with GAME SHOPto etc anyway. Anyway 10% for games which is 1% better than the others, 6% for consoles. Low coms are important with video games as margins really do suck, Amazon is away to hurt video game sellers big time in August so these sites will become the more popular.
Really need things like RMG to actually intergrate with Mirkal now however so time consuming completing the orders on the sites. More retailers will do this it is low risk for them and constant fees for not a lot of work really.
Thanks Sam, i think it’s really only Halfords, game, and shopto at the moment though with these mirkal sites in the U.K. At the moment??
How do manage inventory accross all these mirkal sites?
You can’t upload products yet. The welcome pack describes the phases of the launch. Partners trying to upload stock will receive an error message letting them know that stock can not be uploaded yet.