Gen Con 2003 Spreadsheet summary

[Valamir]

Ok, I finally finished digging through the various receipts and cash sheets and cobbling together a master spreadsheet of GenCon 2003 Forge Sales.  I will make it available to anyone who actually had products for sale at the booth, but you'll have to contact me, since I don't have everyone's email handy...and well...I'm too lazy to track them all down.

If there's anyone who absolutely can't stand to have their information revealed to anyone else email or PM me and I'll delete you from the general sheet I send out.

Some observations.

My plan for collecting names and emails didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped but still worked pretty darn good.  We did get at least partial names for almost 80% of our total sales and emails
for nearly 30%.

But unfortuneately some of the hand writing was hurried enough
that while I did my best to interpret, there are likely some mangled last names and incorrect emails.  A certain party working the receipt book who was not me, Julie, Danielle, Jared, or Gordon was responsible for most of the missing emails and difficult to read script...;-)

Still all in all pretty good.

Since the primary purpose of this spread sheet is to get buyers emails to the appropriate party, I didn't spend a lot of time being 100% precise on the actual sales.  I marked down sales so we'd know which customers bought which games, but this spreadsheet should not be taken to replace the daily cash out numbers from the con itself.

First of all the $ amounts will be off automatically because I made no effort to distinguish between regular price and discounted sales.  This effected BTRC numbers the most since their pdf disks were all uniquely priced and I made no real effort to report these accurately.  The TROS/OBAM numbers are ok, because the combo deal was reported as a seperate line item.

Discounts weren't common enough to throw the total off by a huge amount overall, but individual parties will not balance to your actual con tally if you gave any discounts.

On to some interesting statistics.

There were 287 distinct sales made over the course of the 4 days.
That breaks down to 64 on Thurs, 62 on Fri, 79 on Saturday and 82 on Sunday.  By sales I mean seperate receipts.

Of those sales, over 36% were for more than 1 item
20% were for more than 2
Over 11% were for more than 3
16 sales (5.5%) were for 4 item,
7 sales (2.5%) were for 5 item,
7 sales (2.5%) were for 6 item,
3 sales (1%) were for 7 item
and the all time single sale champion bought 10 games at once (and later came back to buy 1 more).

Note: the above numbers count the TROS and OBAM set as a single item
there would be 11 more sales of 2 or more items making that 40% if the two books are counted seperately.

I think this is a great example of the benefit of cross selling.  A couple of the above multiple item customers were "complete Sorcerer set" customers.  But on the main it was a mix of different games from different creators.  My Life with Master & Kill Puppies being the most common pair (perhaps not unsurprisingly).

One possible downside to having a seperate focal point for BTRC was there was only 1 customer who bought both a BTRC game and a non BTRC game.  I don't think this was a result of the booth people not cross referring (I heard plenty of that both ways) but rather all of the BTRC "selling" was being done in the corner away from the main display, and most of the rest of the selling was done near the display away from the BTRC table.  Something to consider as a data point for future booth arrangement perhaps.  Some of this may just be appealing to a different demographic of gamer too.  Its easy to cross sell Puppies and Master...there's less of an obvious link between Puppies and EABA.



Of those customers for whom we obtained a full (and legible) name, 18 of them were repeat customers;  2 of them coming back 3 times for purchases.

Given the number of sales without names and a fair number of first name only (or last name illegible) sales, the actual number of repeat customers was probably higher.  
         
I think this is probably the most phenomenal statistic of all, and when combined with the fact that I witnessed at least 3 customers shilling our games for us to other customers   and at least 2 who brought friends back for a demo is something we can all be very proud of.  The atmosphere of the booth may not have been as "coffee shop" as we'd hoped but it was still attracting people and generating buzz.            


All told over 513 individual items (not counting miscellaneous tundra stuff) were sold.   This breaks down to 124 on Thursday, 97 on Friday, 136 on Saturday, and 156 on Sunday            
            
In dollar terms (not reduced by discounts as noted above) the booth did $8,105 in business.  This breaks down to $2,167 Thursday, $1,612 Friday, $2015 Saturday, $2,311 on Sunday            
I think that total should well have been enough to cover booth expenses, so if the primaries wound up eating too much in booth costs, there should be a way to distribute this cost more equitably.



I also put together who the top 5 sellers each day were, but other than assuaging curiosity I don't know if the parties involved would consider it appopriate to post that.  If they do, I'm happy to throw that up.

[jrs]

Ralph,

Thanks for pulling together the sales data.  It's interesting to see the final numbers, particularly this one:

There were 287 distinct sales made over the course of the 4 days. ... By sales I mean seperate receipts.

Next year we'll be prepared with a sufficient number of receipt books!  Writing those handwritten receipts on Sunday were a pain.  That's when I gave up even attempting to get email addresses, and I'm certain my handwritting quickly deteriated as well.

Julie

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My handwriting is notorious. Also, I chose to scrap the email step when a huge sales crunch hit really hard at one point.

Best,
Ron

[Armin D. Sykes]

That's all pretty interesting, Ralph. Of course, I have no business interest in the info, but it's interesting in a casual observer kinda way, as well.

I notice by my receipts that I bought 8 games from you folks (plus a box of Tali), over 3 different receipts. Five games plus the tali on one receipt, then I came back later and bought two BTRC items on another receipt, then mentioned Dust Devils when talking to Ron and had to buy that as well.

When you note that there was only one customer who bought both a BTRC game and a non-BTRC game, is that actually only one receipt that listed both such items, or did you actually group customer receipts?

Also, my receipt for Dust Devils does not have my name on it, so you can note that however you wish.

I don't recall being asked for an email address, either, but perhaps by Sunday nobody cared any more (although, in my case, I'm pretty easy to find).

I would have bought more, actually, but I was trying not to bust the budget too much.

Armin