How the Internet Has Leveled the Playing Field in the Toy Market

It can be argued that the Internet has leveled the playing field in the toy market considerably. We are coming from a background where, in days gone by, the toy market would have qualified to be termed as a skewed one. It was skewed in favor of the big-time toy vendors. A small-time toy vendor ended up having major difficulties challenging these big-time toy vendors, who could marshal huge marketing budgets, and get prime-spots on the major streets for their toy showrooms. In the final analysis, the small-time toy vendor ended up facing major challenges in getting any people to walk into his (unknown and ill-situated) toy store.

Enter the Internet, and we now have a much more level playing field – especially in markets where

Majority of the people preferred to buy toys online.

In order to understand how the Internet has turned out to be an ‘equalizer’ in the toy market, it is imperative to be appreciative of ways in which toy buyers find their way into Internet-based toy stores. That where we come to learn that majority of buyers find their way there through the search engines. Buyers looking for, say, angry birds toys, will tend to enter a search for the same in their favorite search engines, hoping to get links to the websites where the angry birds toys are sold. There are, admittedly though, a few buyers who access the various stores where toys are sold by directly entering URLs into browser address bars.

Now inasmuch as majority of potential toy buyers find their way into toy stores through the search engines, it turns out that both big-time toy vendors and small-toy toy vendors have an equal chance of getting favorably listed, provided they invest in search engine optimization and pay per click advertising in the right way. When a potential toy buyer looking for angry birds toys searches for the same, the links he gets are not presented on the basis of the ‘bigness’ of the respective vendors. Rather, it is the respective vendors’ effectiveness in search engine optimization which makes the difference. The big-time vendors may have a slight advantage, with respect to buyers who access stores directly through URL entries (since their URLs are typically very well known). But as we saw earlier, the number of potential toy buyers doing so tends to be negligible.