Game banking on e-commerce to revive faltering business

Thursday, April 28, 2011 - 10:03 by David Aiken

High street videogame retailer Game has this week announced a significant drop in its profits and a slump in sales, but it is thought to be looking to the world of safe shopping online to turn around its business, as other bricks and mortar entertainment chains suffer similar economic woes.

Game CEO, Ian Shepherd, said that the firm was well aware of how consumers are taking their retail habits and spreading them across multiple platforms, from online to instore and now mobile.

Mr Shepherd explained that the growth of Game would largely depend on its clawing out a bigger space for itself in the online marketplace, where it is currently outpaced by its competitors despite its total dominance of the UK high street in the same sector.

What Mr Shepherd and the other Game executives want to achieve is a unified experience across all of its operational platforms, so that consumers can pop into a store or go to its website and still get the same degree of customer service.

Game is looking to broaden the type of products it sells as well as the kind of payments which it is able to accept, with Mr Shepherd citing the fact that it is developing novel ways for consumers to purchase items via safe shopping online. He did not elaborate as to what this might involve, but any innovation is going to be seen as welcome.

At the moment the customers which Game values the most are those which use its high street stores as well as its online services, largely because they invest more cash in the firm in the long run.

Game is currently accountable for 13 per cent of online videogame sales in the UK and it will be hoping to make its share expand in the coming years.