Retail Therapy Promises to be Bigger (and Better for Retailers) Than FarmVille
Sick of virtually tending livestock and fertilizing crops (or reading about your friends' farms)? Maybe stocking jewelry or merchandising jeans is more your speed. If so, there's Retail Therapy â€"- also the virtual kind. Sugar Inc. just debuted this new online game for Facebook that takes the FarmVille concept a step further â€"- with click-to-buy merchandise. And thousands of wannabe fashion buyers and shop owners are already nurturing their inner shopaholic.
Backed by Sugar Inc. which powers the popular blogs PopSugar, BellaSugar, and FabSugar, Retail Therapy is the media network's latest way to leverage its platform, existing advertisers, and vast user base into a new revenue stream. The game itself is simple, and the potential to draw users and real transactions is simply genius.
Players begin with an empty shop and $2,500 worth of 'coins,' to purchase virtual stock for their stores. These assortments are made up of au courant items from partnering designers such as Diane Von Furstenberg, Tori Burch, Juicy Couture, TopShop and the like. After purchasing, merchandising and collaborating with others, players gain points to get to higher levels and more exclusive products.
What's most elegant is the win-win-win baked into the game:
Partnering brands enjoy "the ultimate product placement," that can (and most certainly will) lead to actual purchases, especially if sample sales are thrown in the mix. Designers like DVF, who routinely spend hundreds of thousands to show at NY Fashion Week, can reach millions more potential buyers without the high production costs of a 15 minute runway show.
Players won't get bored with a seemingly endless supply of merchandise, as the selections are constantly refreshed to reflect changing seasons and new collections. And they'll be able to shop with a virtual posse.
Sugar's putting a full court press going on competing games like Mall World and gets the added bonus of having a new way to engage its ever-growing community (16 million and counting) while building on Shop Style, its already successful e-commerce component.
But there are some bugs (literal-albeit-virtual "moths") in Retail Therapy. CEO Brian Sugar admitted that even with a soft launch the site exceeded early expectations, and now with 4,000 users, the problems are frustrating new gamers. One wrote:
No matter what I do I cannot keep the racks full, and neither can my neighbors. I don't have even 1 neighbor with clothes on the racks. I guess if I want all my racks full I will have to cut them back to 4 or less. I just feel like I'm beating my head against a wall. I'm going back to Mall World and I'll check back in a month or two and see if they have a fixed a way to close our stores until we can get some stock.
If Sugar can get Retail Therapy's tech problems ironed out and beef up its game support staff in a hurry, the potential for building a hybrid fashion e-commerce empire is only clicks away.
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