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 Kilkrazy wrote:
From what I remember Mrs Kirby was the head of the project but I can't remember where I read that.

It could be a complete canard as suggested above by Azreal13.


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Back on topic, we now know that the new web store cost £4 million over two years, but we are still not sure if that was a real bargain, a total rip-off, or a fair price.

It seems rather on the high side to me, in view of what they rolled out, but that is easily explicable by incompetence.

It seems on the high side but also seems like a common "take advantage of a dumb corporation" type of IT consulting trick that I see often.

Yeah, I thought it was a typo at first. And it took them, what, a year to get it done?

It's just some PHP and a few pretty pictures of their merchandise. I've done plenty of web design, and that mangled mess of a website could have been done by a couple of guys in a month for ten or twenty grand, much less four MILLION.

The whole thing does smack a little bit of creative accounting.

Well since its international, they may have some costs associated with the various laws and regs in every country, and advising on that probably wasnt that cheap.

food for thought. It could also come with a big insurance policy.

But surely GW already has a lawyer or two on retainer who would know this stuff. You know, in between suing fiction writers and hobbyists. In any case, I doubt a laywer that can ensure compliance of international sales tax costs over $6 million a year...

 Jancoran wrote:
Well since its international, they may have some costs associated with the various laws and regs in every country, and advising on that probably wasnt that cheap.

They would have already had all that information from the previous incarnation of the website, which was also international.

food for thought. It could also come with a big insurance policy.

That would be an operating expense, not a part of the cost of setting up the website.

 Ailaros wrote:
But surely GW already has a lawyer or two on retainer who would know this stuff. You know, in between suing fiction writers and hobbyists. In any case, I doubt a laywer that can ensure compliance of international sales tax costs over $6 million a year...

Doesnt mean they have the expertise. lawyers dont know all parts of the law proficiently. The law changes. New countries get involved. Taxes change. Its a big world out there.

Sure, but even if tax laws change enough that they need to change it with the website, as insaniak mentions, it's not specific to the website.

Those same tax laws are things they're already needing to accommodate for, just being a producer and distributor. It's only changes in retail law that would directly affect the website, and, once again, there aren't going to be millions of dollars of changes every couple of years.

And if there were in any particular country, GW just wouldn't direct ship to there anymore. Or charge a lot more from that one country to compensate for that country's effect on their bottom line.

 Azreal13 wrote:

I've seen a number of people appear to attribute the 4m exceptional cost in the report to the webstore, which isn't the case, they have spent 4m on a webstore, but that isn't the reason for the exceptional cost listed in the report, so they've spent 4m on the webstore and another 4m on a staff exterminatus.

Got it, was a major reading comprehension failure on my part, thanks for clearing it up.

Sigh, not this canard again. The actual web page is just a front of the supply system. It's the invisible stuff which costs - keeping track of your supply, warehouse etc. People look at the web page and go 'omg they paid £4m from THAT?'. No, they didn't. The actual web page costed only fraction of the whole. As mentioned in the report, the webstore project began already in 2013 and that's when most of the investments were done.

£4 million is not at all exceptional cost for such a project. There are webstore projects which have costed 100+ million USD. In fact, GW probably chose completely off-the-shelf commercial solution to save money - which is why the webstore looks so boring, plain and generic.

Backfire wrote:
Sigh, not this canard again. The actual web page is just a front of the supply system. It's the invisible stuff which costs - keeping track of your supply, warehouse etc. People look at the web page and go 'omg they paid £4m from THAT?'. No, they didn't. The actual web page costed only fraction of the whole. As mentioned in the report, the webstore project began already in 2013 and that's when most of the investments were done.

£4 million is not at all exceptional cost for such a project. There are webstore projects which have costed 100+ million USD. In fact, GW probably chose completely off-the-shelf commercial solution to save money - which is why the webstore looks so boring, plain and generic.

Yes it is an exceptional cost. £4 million is a huge cost for a project such as this and there aren't any "invisible stuff" that could possibly inflate costs to that point, especially in such a small company as GW.

And what were those webstore projects that cost 100+ million USD?


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Ok, lets make some actual calculations for the requirements that a site like this might have.

I heard that they went with Oracle databases, so a top of the line, best there is, there is absolutely no reason why a company like GW would ever need a machine like this, Oracle server would cost them 150k GBP + about 17k for top of the line Oracle support and licenses.

Lets say that GW needed 100% up time capability and absolute redundancy so they bought two of those.

Total cost: 340k GBP

Next come the application servers, another top of the line, multi-core, multi-processor, several terabytes of RAM, all the bells and whistles that again GW would be pretty stupid to pay for because they don't need it, application server will set them back about 50k. They bought 2 those for load balancing ( ), and redundancy. Factor in another 10k for software licenses and support for each server and you get 120k.

Lets say that they overspent hugely and spent another 100k on all the remaining bits and bobs (racks, switches, UPSs, etc). They've spent 560k total so far.

Now, custom software development is usually charged by the man-hour. Again, lets say that they overpaid, or that they bought for the absolutely best team that money can buy and that they charged an average of 150 GBP for man-hour for each team member. The company that they contracted spent 6 months setting it all up with a 4 man team. In my professional opinion, this again would be to over engineer the whole thing to the point of ridiculousness, nothing in that site even suggests that they would need this amount of custom development or the expertise that such a high price tag would bring, but lets roll with it. Total cost = 633k GBP

Rounding it all up comes to 1,2 million GBP.

What on earth did they spent the rest of the money on?!

I'm no computer expert but it seems there web store is linked to there stock managment which in turn would be linked into there production scedules and stores would be linked into shipping and all this tied with multipul site bases for diffrent regions using various pay options in various currencys and methods all of which need to be 100% secure (or as secure as you can get) running through multipul servers in multipul countries.
I can see that the base cost would be less than 4mil but the softwhere to tie/run all parts together could be very costly.

Skullhammer wrote:
I'm no computer expert but it seems there web store is linked to there stock managment which in turn would be linked into there production scedules and stores would be linked into shipping and all this tied with multipul site bases for diffrent regions using various pay options in various currencys and methods all of which need to be 100% secure (or as secure as you can get) running through multipul servers in multipul countries.
I can see that the base cost would be less than 4mil but the softwhere to tie/run all parts together could be very costly.

Granted, but with a little over 400 stores, plus a few other distribution hubs/warehouses etc, that works out as nearly 10k per site licence. When I ran my (non gaming related) store, my supplier gave me a software package very similar to what you're describing (and what you're describing is probably very close to what GW have.) But with a much more sophisticated front end as my invoicing needs were more complex than scanning product and taking payment.

There is nothing, aside from their own self importance, that I can see would warrant a bespoke package for GW when there are many off the shelf packages commercially available, and I can't see that anything but a bespoke package would run to the cost you're describing.

Skullhammer wrote:
I'm no computer expert but it seems there web store is linked to there stock managment which in turn would be linked into there production scedules and stores would be linked into shipping and all this tied with multipul site bases for diffrent regions using various pay options in various currencys and methods all of which need to be 100% secure (or as secure as you can get) running through multipul servers in multipul countries.
I can see that the base cost would be less than 4mil but the softwhere to tie/run all parts together could be very costly.

If they had indeed redone all of their IT infrastructure then I would have had no problem believing in these costs, but they specifically mention spending that money in the site alone.

Also that whole various pay options in various currencies is a fallacy. All the actual payment part is usually processed by the CC companies and by PayPal (which AFAIK are the only payment methods accepted by the GW site) and the whole thing is very, very cheap to implement in the sellers part.

Also, stock management in relation to the web store is as difficult as making sure that the field in the database that has the available stock is marked up when new stock becomes available and down when a sale is made. Everything else should have already been a part of their normal stock management processes and as such should have already been in production.

None of this is rocket science people, all the online stores in the world have these exact same capabilities, including the web store for my local FLGS and they certainly didn't pay 4 million quid for it.

Backfire wrote:People look at the web page and go 'omg they paid £4m from THAT?'. No, they didn't. The actual web page costed only fraction of the whole. As mentioned in the report, the webstore project began already in 2013 and that's when most of the investments were done.

£4 million is not at all exceptional cost for such a project. There are webstore projects which have costed 100+ million USD. In fact, GW probably chose completely off-the-shelf commercial solution to save money - which is why the webstore looks so boring, plain and generic.

They already had an inventory management system before they made the new website. Furthermore, inventory management systems and websites are not the same thing. Even a little bit. You might as well say that they had to buy land for a new factory in cheshire and that was part of the website.

Furthermore, I don't know what's really gained by claiming there were "invisible" costs. By that line of reasoning, 4 million GBP was a practical bargain given how much they had to send a man into space, and sacrifice a twenty-ton statue of solid gold to placate Cthulhu, and build a death ray to destroy nine planets orbiting other stars.

In reality, they needed someone to write a bit of HTML, hire someone who knows a little PHP and SQL to display the contents of their inventory database, and get a person to take new photos of all their stuff and update the prices on things. Building a website isn't some mysterious money vortex, it's no more complicated than creating a print catalogue. Except you don't have to spend money for ink, paper, or postage.

Yea, I think it's important to remember it was an update to an existing site, not a brand new one with nothing in place.

Like a few others, I work for a web design company and I find it unfathomable how they spent 4 million on the new site. I mean, unless they somehow lumped some other expenses in there.

Skullhammer wrote:
I'm no computer expert but it seems there web store is linked to there stock managment which in turn would be linked into there production scedules and stores would be linked into shipping and all this tied with multipul site bases for diffrent regions using various pay options in various currencys and methods all of which need to be 100% secure (or as secure as you can get) running through multipul servers in multipul countries.
I can see that the base cost would be less than 4mil but the softwhere to tie/run all parts together could be very costly.

Don't forget that GW already had a web store and a supply chain system from several years ago which they had been upgrading since the late 2000s.

GW themselves make no suggestion that they spent £4 million on renewing their entire enterprise resource planning system. Why do we need to assume they did that?

Who cares unless you are an investor? It's not like they will reduce the price of miniatures if they built a cheaper website.

We wrote:
Who cares unless you are an investor? It's not like they will reduce the price of miniatures if they built a cheaper website.

Hey for some of us the most anticipated release of the year from GW was the financial report with this information in it.

We wrote:
Who cares unless you are an investor? It's not like they will reduce the price of miniatures if they built a cheaper website.

It's a concern for anyone who has been following GW's recent years' financial performance. They're tightening their belts everywhere they possibly can in order to stay profitable, but then go and throw away millions of pounds on an uneccessary and seemingly over-priced website redesign?

How many new plastic moulds could have been made for that four million pounds?

That's a good question. I can guess vaguely how much it would cost to build a website, but I haven't the faintest how much it would cost to, say, go from nothing through design and mould-making and casting and selling a new plastic mini.

 Ailaros wrote:
That's a good question. I can guess vaguely how much it would cost to build a website, but I haven't the faintest how much it would cost to, say, go from nothing through design and mould-making and casting and selling a new plastic mini.

I forget which thread it was in but I recently saw someone claim/estimate that Tamya's moulds have dropped in price from 2 million in the 90s to a measly 50 thousand today.

Keeping in mind that costs are on a per sprue basis (Tamya stuff usual has 4-6 to GWs 2-3) I wouldn't be shocked to hear GWs plastic characters are as little as 10 thousand a mould.

Well, and as technology improves it allows you to make the same kinds of things more cheaply, but that's not really GW's schtick. New plastic kits are always made better than the old ones, rather than more of the same.

Of course, I may not agree on the aesthetic, but there's no question that technically GW minis are a great deal more involved than they used to be.

This is an area in which I have great experience and may speak with authority.

$4-$6 million on a major website is a lot of money, but not out of the ballpark unreasonable. Some things that are expensive to build that people developing websites may not consider are:

- different versions for different markets, and GW has a lot. It isn't just a currency conversion. Add one product or banner, and you need it in Canadian French, or German. Each market also has different products available.

- It is linked to GW's enterprise system, perhaps SAP. This is *extremely* expensive. We bill out a thousand dollars an hour for a SAP integration development expert, and those experts are fully booked well in advance.

- Security, scalability, and speed in different markets is expensive. For example, that $200 cable modem gives great bandwidth to your local market, but will give terrible performance serving webpages to Japan. This is not a simple or cheap problem to tackle.

- Salaries are expensive. One internal salary can easily be $150,000 a year for management or an expert on a subject (like SQL or the server system), and $60,000 or more for a competent, qualified junior position. The team likely has quite a few people.

- Uptime is expensive. 95% uptime is cheap, 99% is more expensive, and 99.99% is an order of magnitude more expensive.

- There are also mobile versions.

- As you increase the number of developers, their efficiency drops. Having a team of 10 developers gets you a lot less mileage than 10 developers working on 10 separate, smaller projects. The overhead is extremely significant.

- A year is a reasonable (even quick) development time.

Now, GW's site is not *incredible* but it is decently professional and works reasonably well. It has relatively few products (as compared, for example, to Home Depot), and has very little non-product information (for example, how to's). He search is pretty functional, as is the checkout process.

One thing that is pretty unprofessional -- it gets session timeouts if you just walk away from the browser for a while. This is ok on a PC (well, not really), but lousy on a tablet, where people leave a page open all the time. There is no good reason to do this; while this makes sense for online banking or the purchase of an airline or concert ticket (either security concerns or availability rapidly changing) almost all major online retailers have a solution to prevent this, either by simply persisting the session, or recreating it using cookies and data persisted in a database.

Did GW pay too much? Maybe a little, but a lot of other companies pay a lot more, and don't have something that works decently somehow for it. I think they did ok.

Other companies are orders of magnitude larger.
I would bet GW isn't using SAP, based solely on the employee base. The investment just isn't worth it.

4 9s uptime isn't that bad - where I used to work that was the minimum expected out of a service and it was .edu, so we had no money to implement with.

I think people are seriously overestimating GWs size.

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Now, if it was written from scratch? Maybe. Based on how it looks, it wasn't. It is a generic template with some customizations.

rigeld2 wrote:
Other companies are orders of magnitude larger.
I would bet GW isn't using SAP, based solely on the employee base. The investment just isn't worth it.

4 9s uptime isn't that bad - where I used to work that was the minimum expected out of a service and it was .edu, so we had no money to implement with.

I think people are seriously overestimating GWs size.

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Now, if it was written from scratch? Maybe. Based on how it looks, it wasn't. It is a generic template with some customizations.

If GW isn't using SAP, it's still using an expensive system. PeopleSoft consultants are just as expensive. It's a publicly traded company with going concerns in many countries, and there are consolidation requirements that aren't cheap.

The total revenues of GW for YE June 2014 is 123.5 million GBP -- That's almost $200 million USD.

While that isn't huge, it's still a pretty significant number, especially in the miniature/miniature wargaming industry. Spending 2% of annual revenue on a website isn't really that crazy, and a part of that is probably amortized (ie they aren't going to rebuild their website from scratch every year). Put it into perspective: if your company made $1 million a year in sales, it could easily spend more than $20,000 on its web presence, if that would contribute to sales or if your industry demanded it.

I don't believe any of the miniature companies other than GW are publicly traded, but to put it into perspective, Wizards of the Coast has revenues of about $1.5 - $2 billion, I think (that's very off the top of my head).

While it isn't super original, I can't think of a generic template that would do what GW's site does (if such were available and cheap, it would be very popular). Of course, it might use sample materials from an e-commerce platform, or it might be a derivative work of something custom that was built by the developer but that isn't exactly out of the norm. The autofill in the search is quite responsive, the AJAX-style page updates are snappy, item browsing is quite usable (for instance, navigating to 40k, then Dark Eldar, and flipping through products, or looking for a base paint, etc.).

I think that high uptime is important, because GW serves many geographically disparate regions that cover a wide spectrum of time zones. Unlike Home Depot, it can't shut down at midnight every day, and if the website goes down while it's 2 am in London, someone in California is going to be annoyed.

Talys wrote:- different versions for different markets, and GW has a lot. It isn't just a currency conversion. Add one product or banner, and you need it in Canadian French, or German. Each market also has different products available.

Name one product GW makes that it sells in some markets but not in others.

In any case, translating the name of something from English into German is trivial, and you can put multiple language information in the same database. Plus, as mentioned, all of this stuff was already done for the old website. They should have spent literally no money at all on this.

Talys wrote:- It is linked to GW's enterprise system, perhaps SAP. This is *extremely* expensive. We bill out a thousand dollars an hour for a SAP integration development expert, and those experts are fully booked well in advance.

And, once again, they already had this interface before. They just needed to tweak the PHP interface.

And even then, we're talking about a few thousand products for sale, it's not like they need some vast software suite to handle this, and certainly not something much bigger than what they already had before.

Talys wrote:- Security, scalability, and speed in different markets is expensive. For example, that $200 cable modem gives great bandwidth to your local market, but will give terrible performance serving webpages to Japan. This is not a simple or cheap problem to tackle.

Talys wrote:- Uptime is expensive. 95% uptime is cheap, 99% is more expensive, and 99.99% is an order of magnitude more expensive.

There's no way they ran their own servers before, they would have just leased the space.

Space that they were already leasing before the website revamp. I can't imagine they decided to rent THAT much more bandwidth.

Talys wrote:- Salaries are expensive. One internal salary can easily be $150,000 a year for management or an expert on a subject (like SQL or the server system), and $60,000 or more for a competent, qualified junior position. The team likely has quite a few people.

Tell me where I can find a starter job as a SQL jock that pays 60k a year.

No doubt salaries did make up a big chunk of change. Undoubtedly they overpaid on this part. Logging a few new things into a database that already existed is, once again, trivial. Unless they rebuilt their entire database from scratch. Ten or twenty times.

Talys wrote:- There are also mobile versions.

That require a few hours from a man who knows CSS to make tweaks to.

Talys wrote:- A year is a reasonable (even quick) development time.

What?

They took a website that already existed. They changed the CSS a bit, threw in a new menu system in PHP and threw it on top of an existing database. You seem to be implying that they demolished a building and then rebuilt it entirely from scratch, instead of merely applying a new coat of paint to the exterior.

Even then, six million dollars is insane for what amounts to nothing more than an online catalogue that can take credit cards.

I think what you're getting confused about is this:

rigeld2 wrote:Other companies are orders of magnitude larger.

GW has a few hundred products that it sells, most of which it does through traditional distribution, rather than online retail. It's not a mega multinational dealing with millions of clients and trillions of interactions, it's a few guys in a shed in Nottinghamshire hawking toys.

The kinds of enterprise solutions you're talking about are for something of a completely different scope.

 Ailaros wrote:
Name one product GW makes that it sells in some markets but not in others.

In fairness, he wasn't wrong on that part. A quick comparison of the UK and Australian sites showed a few differences. For instance on the UK site there are more sprays than are available here in Australia. There are a few things available in Aus, such as the burnt grass basing material, or the LOD legionnaire with a flamer, that aren't on the UK site. They're not major differences, but they are there.

Did the £4M only include the website overhaul?
Or, was it a contract with their website building contractor who also threw together the new news app, and other yet-to-be-released stuff?
£4M is a lot for a website, back-end servers, and database overhaul. They seem to have taken new photos of most models, but that's about it. Maybe a flash whizzy intranet got thrown in for the GW HQ.

It cost them so much due to one thing: Oracle Consultants

Using those guys to build anything means it will be incredibly expensive.

Bear in mind that the webstore is not just the site at www.games-workshop.com The costs also include updates for their manufacturing/packaging/shipping system.

Still, they WAY overpaid.

clively wrote:
It cost them so much due to one thing: Oracle Consultants

Using those guys to build anything means it will be incredibly expensive.

Bear in mind that the webstore is not just the site at www.games-workshop.com The costs also include updates for their manufacturing/packaging/shipping system.

Still, they WAY overpaid.

Oh, dear. The dreaded Oracle consultants.

Their highest paid salesman makes $40k a year base, and the rest of his earnings come from the eternal misery of those they serve.