UK indie retailers flock to online space

Independent retailers across the UK are finding refuge online, in order to offset pressure from supermarket price cutting, digital downloads and piracy.

Alongside an increased online presence, many independents are focusing on their customer service, their range of retro software and console repair services, allowing them to grow in the face of improved competition from the likes of HMV, Blockbuster and Tesco.

We’re looking at consolidating this year,” said Third Place’s Matthew Allan. Our online site accounted for 20 per cent of our sales last year, and we’re going to focus on making that as big as possible, as well as concentrating on what we’re good at in store.”

For the future we plan to keep consolidating and building in line with the growth of the video games industry”, added Gordon Crawford of Gamespod. We will focus on opportunities through the internet in particular.”

The move onto the web for indies follows the growing success of online specialists tGrav, Gameseek and Shopto, with many indies developing a full online presence after trading through eBay and Amazon market place.

We at Sholing video are currently running an eBay store, which has sent out nearly 1,000 units in two months,” said Paul Lemesurier. We plan to follow this with a new store being developed online at the moment, which should prove successful.”