Green Man Gaming – International E-commerce Case Study

Introduction to the company
With offices in London and Santa Monica, Green Man Gaming is one of the leading digital games e-commerce platforms globally. Heavily data driven and focused exclusively on core gamers, Green Man Gaming combines its game-tracking community, Playfire.com, with its robust digital E-commerce platform, greenmangaming.com, to create the most integrated social commerce platform in the video game industry.

Your international e-commerce story
At launch in the summer of 2010, Green Man Gaming’s founding team had anticipated its core initial markets to be the UK and Northern Europe for its first 18 months of operation. Within six hours of launching, the company had sold over 400 games in Japan alone, opening up the company’s growth trajectory and international reach from the outset.

Today, Green Man Gaming sells games to customers in 180 different countries in five currencies every month, with only 10% of customers being based in the UK. It has become a true British international exporter. 

Secrets to your success
A disruptive approach to an industry in flux
In a rapidly transforming and highly-fragmented industry, Green Man Gaming has taken a disruptive approach from the outset, which has set the company up for steady growth. At launch, Green Man Gaming revolutionised the PC digital distribution market with its US patent pending digital trade-in system, offering the globally unique ability to trade in digitally downloaded games. Currently Green Man Gaming is the only games e-commerce platform that harnesses automatically generated “big data” on gamers and gameplay behavioural data to fuel commerce growth.

These key points of differentiation have been critical for Green Man Gaming to stand out in the $66 billion-dollar games industry.

Agility and rapid responsiveness
In the online world, speed is everything. The ability to be able to react to opportunities in the market rapidly is critical. Green Man Gaming works hard to ensure that the technology and commercial teams work in partnership, to delivering quick incremental benefits for customers in response to changes in market conditions..

Meeting demand anytime and anywhere
Because our business is online and our customers are spread all over the world, it’s been critical for us to operate globally, offering 24/7 support. 

Honesty and transparency

Relationships are at the core of what we do, and our commitment to being honest and transparent with customers, business partners and the wider gaming community has helped us build an active, durable community. In keeping this ethos core to how we work, we’ve built a team and network that reflect our values and set us up for long-term success.

Challenges you have overcome

Raising capital
Raising capital is always a challenge for any start- up in any market. This is certainly something that Green Man Gaming encountered when raising capital in late 2009 given the tough global economic climate.

Overcoming growing pains
Hitting that fine line between the requirements of today and anticipating tomorrow’s potential needs has been a healthy and on going challenge for Green Man Gaming, particularly in the context of 3x year-on-year growth!

Conclusions
The UK has been a fantastic place for Green Man Gaming to establish its global headquarters given its geographic positioning to reach a truly global customer base, access to exceptional technical talent, excellent infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated venture ecosystem.

With its growing culture of angel investing, along with EIS tax breaks for investors and R&D tax claims, the UK is truly one of the most appealing places in the world to start a business for any company looking to scale. Equally 85% of EU based VC’s have a base in London and are always keen to work with ambitious companies with an eye on a global market.

And last but not least, there is that rare and invaluable great trait of revelling in the fact that Brits are the underdog, consequently driving the very best performance….

Topics: E-commerce
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