ThinkGeek.com, the online retailing arm of SourceForge Inc., joins a growing list of web merchants posting declining first quarter sales.
For the quarter ended March 31, SourceForge reported e-commerce revenue of $6.6 million, a decrease of 2.9% from web sales of $6.8 million in the first quarter of 2008. Overall SourceForge, No. 250 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, recorded total sales of $10.4 million, a year-over-year decline of 8.8% from total sales of $11.4 million in Q1 of 2008. The web accounted for 63% of total sales in the quarter as online media sales decreased by 17.4% to $3.8 million from $4.6 million.
The company posted a GAAP net loss of $7.4 million in the first quarter compared with a net loss of $916,000 in the prior-year quarter. The loss included a $4.6 million impairment charge for the company's investment in CollabNet. "While we are not satisfied with the results of the first quarter, I am confident about the merits of our new strategy and the value of the investments we are making in our business,” says SourceForge CEO Scott Kauffman.
In the first quarter ThinkGeek.com shipped 116,000 orders, an increase of 16% from the prior year quarter, and the average sales conversion rate increased to 1.6% from 1.4% in the first quarter of 2008, the company says. But the average order on ThinkGeek.com declined year over year by 14.1% to $61 from $71. Also in the first quarter SourceForge acquired Ohloh Corp., a privately held provider of open source data and owner of an open source data community. Ohloh’s technology crawls approximately 3,500 open source web sites and gathers data on more than 300,000 open source projects. Ohloh also tracks open source activity through its community and provides data to technology companies. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Back...
