Selling on your own website

Your own website is the sales channel you fully control: full MSRP, your branding, your customer data, and no marketplace rules changing under you. Platforms like Shopify make the technical side straightforward. For a single game a simple one-product store is enough, and payment processing costs roughly 3 percent per transaction, trivially cheap compared with any other channel's cut.

Shipping is where website stores succeed or fail. Board games are heavy and bulky, and buyers abandon carts over shipping costs constantly. Get real rate quotes for your boxed weight to typical destinations before setting prices, consider flat-rate shipping subsidized slightly from your margin, and be careful with international orders, where postage can exceed the game's price. Many publishers restrict their own store to domestic orders and point international buyers to retail partners or regional fulfillment.

The hard truth is that a store without traffic sells nothing. Nobody stumbles onto a small publisher's website. Your store converts the audience you build elsewhere: mailing list, crowdfunding backers, convention demos, social media, and reviews. The mailing list is the highest-value asset here. It is the only audience channel you own outright, and a modest list of engaged players reliably outsells a large but passive social following.

Once orders grow past what your garage can handle, connect the store to a fulfillment partner so orders flow automatically to their warehouse. Keep your store's pricing at full MSRP to protect retailer relationships, and use exclusive extras, like signed copies or promo items, rather than discounts, to give people a reason to buy from you directly.