Bringing small businesses online!
Local Games Online (LGO)
The goals of LGO are:
- Provide online expertise and additional revenue streams for small businesses
- Provide a modern online shopping experience without modern anti-consumer practices
Assisting Small Businesses
The first goal of LGO is to help small businesses succeed. Our scope includes all aspect of our company from partner brick and mortar stores, online service providers, content creators and game developers. A lot of small business don't have an online presence either by choice or because they don't have the time/expertise to set one up and run it. We want to help small businesses get a bigger piece of the pie. Our goal is to help level the playing field with big coprorations by making the online market more accessible to everyone.
How do we support small businesses?
Every purchase on this site will directly support a small business whether it is a local game shop, merchandise supplier or video game developer. We do more than just provide a method for supporting small businesses.
If our partners don't make money, we don't make money. There are no sign-up or monthly fees. All revenue is sales driven. We just exist as a unified store-front of other small businesses.
Being Pro-Consumer
Everyone can relate to this story:
- You go to a website you have been to before
- Without you knowing Facebook, Google, TikTok, Twitter etc. all get told you went here even if you chose to not have accounts with them
- Dismiss cookie prompt
- Scroll to see what you want
- Close out ads
- Scroll back to what you want to see
- You make a purchase
- Opt-out of marking emails
- Still get marking emails
- Unsubscribe by clicking white text on a white background
- The next day you are doing something else and get ads for the thing you already bought
- Your stuff comes a few days later
We want to provide a first class shopping experience along with providing a "retro" online experience. An online experience from before the days of cookie prompts and trackers monitoring everything that happens. This retro experience means:
Transparency
- Mimimum use of information - If you give us your email address to track an order, it will only be used to track that order
- No background trackers - What you do on any site or app is between you and them, no one else
- Cloudflare for most hosting
- Plausible for analytics
- Stripe for payment processing
- Proton for email communication
- Google Cloud for some server resources Cloudflare doesn't offer
- Shippo for shipping labels
Advertising Ethically
There are two main kinds of online advertising, personalized and contextual. Personalized advertising has grown to take over the internet but it comes at a cost. Every company that benefits from advertising in any way contributes to the global tracking of all users so that they can either:
- Sell ads and make more money because buyers know more information about the user(you)
- Can pay money to show their ads to users who are likely to engage with their brand. A lot of time this is called "re-targeting" since if someone has been to your site once, they are more likely to come back
This happens on basically every site. Regulations and privacy concerns catching up to common practices have increased the presense of banners on everything you do.
We believe that people should be able to just use the internet without engaging in that ecosystem. If you choose to not have an account with a company, then that company has no reason to get told that you went to some random other site.
This is why all advertisements from us will be contextual. This means that if you are on a video game site, you could see our ads. If you are on a news site, you won't see our ads no matter how much time you spent on our site.