Discshop Turns 10

Photo by Niklas Palmklint

More than 550 employees, customers, suppliers, partners and other friends helped celebrate Discshop.se's tenth anniversary on Tuesday evening, with an exclusive preview of the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino.

Discshop was the brainchild of two film and game maniacs who wanted to be able to see and play everything before anybody else could. The pair began importing games and movies on their own. This labor of love has grown into one of the largest online stores for film and games in Sweden.

"The service comes first for us," says Discshop CEO Henrik Oscarsson. "One example is speed: order a movie before 4 pm today, you have it tomorrow. Managing changes and complaints should be problem-free, so while competitors only offer customer service via e-mail, we have a telephone operators, because we think it is important to have personal contacts."

The site is the public face of the company, and the idea is to provide what Henrik calls "sophisticated simplicity".

"Our target group is connoisseur of film, so they make high demands. And I would say that none of our competitors in the Nordic countries have as good product as we do." 

With 16,000 films and almost 3,000 games in stock, Discshop can meet most requests.

"Our philosophy is based on the 'long tail' theory, that if you have a really large amount of products, there will be higher demand. We are not the best at selling mass market products like Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean, but we are hard to beat when it comes to obscure German films."

Today Discshop has around 600,000 unique visitors per month on the Swedish site, and around 150,000 on the Finnish site. Sales are increasing steadily, with games leading the charge: between 2006 and 2007, game sales increased by 95 percent.

"The vision is to offer every product in different forms of distribution, either as a DVD, Blu-ray, download, or video on demand—all at different prices to different consumers," says Henrik.