Where should you begin, if you want to start selling books online and you haven’t done it before? Well, here’s an idea. I recommend that you read this book from cover to cover before taking a single other concrete step toward establishing an online bookshop. You may reject every idea you find here, but I am confident that you’ll know even better why you are going to do things the way you are going to do them, if you first subject yourself to the ideas and suggestions contained herein.
Every business has a “brand” and culture that is identifiable to its customers, even if the owner of the business is utterly oblivious to this fact. For most sellers operating within the Amazon Marketplace, a big part of that “brand” is provided by Amazon and is not immediately in our control, but there are other elements that we do control or influence including our shop name and its connotations, the kinds of communication and information we provide individually to buyers, the presentation of our business and its policies on Amazon, the contents and average rating in our customer feedback file, our selection, prices, and areas of specialty, the condition of books we ship, the promptness with which ship, the care we use in packaging, and the way we handle complaints, confusion, and requests for returns or refunds. As important as each of these things is individually, it is equally important that they all fit together into a coherent “identity” or “culture” for a business.
Many sellers devote a good deal of time to processes such as deciding upon a store’s name or writing the text that will appear on its storefront, and I agree with the premise upon which this investment is made: what a prospective buyer sees, when surfing around Amazon and often making impulse buying decisions, is very important.
When I opened a brick and mortar store called the Dorchester Reading Authority in Boston in 1986 I tried to achieve a tone and culture reminiscent of the Prairie Home Companion radio show that was peaking in popularity at that time; mine was the first and only bookstore in a very urban community of over 100,000 people, and the “motto” on our bookmarks, stationery, and newsletter made the modest claim that “You won’t find a better bookstore around here.”
Years later, in establishing my first Amazon storefront, I figured that the main constant that any prospective buyer would be looking at when determining whether to buy a book I had listed, as opposed to some other similar copy from a competitor, would be the name I gave my storefront. (They would also see price and description, but those of course would not be constant on all items). I wanted to hit on a name that somehow communicated a brand identity. Noticing that I was listing books for half their retail price triggered fond memories of Sunday afternoons spent browsing a terrific used bookstore during my community organizing days in Dallas in the 1970s, and I decided to call my storefront Half-Priced Books, never imagining that the used bookstore Ken Gjemre had operated in a converted laundromat in Dallas in those days would still be in operation, let alone be the flagship of a chain of dozens of stores in at least eight states. Fortuitously, I suppose, I had forgotten that Ken had decided to call his store Half-Price Books (www.halfpricebooks.com), without a “d”, when he opened his first store in 1972. In any case, after I had been selling online for a year or so I started to become aware that Half-Price Books was still in business, and that, not surprisingly, it was also selling books online. I resolved that, if ever contacted by their attorneys, I would point out the existence of the “d” in my business name and let them know that it was not accidental, communicating, at least to any teacher of good grammar, if there are such beings around any more, that Half-Price Books was selling books that were worth only half the list price, while Half-Priced Books was selling books that had been priced by us at half the list price. Pardon the digression. Ultimately, as market pressures drove prices down at Amazon’s Marketplace, I decided that Half-Priced Books was no longer a good brand identity, and changed our name to give respect to my Cherokee handle by making it Windwalker Books, which obviously does not communicate any single brand message to most prospective buyers, but I like it.
As important as it is to establish a brand identity, it is equally important, I think, to establish an “internal” culture for your business, and I would suggest that establishing that culture, for an online bookseller, involves determining the answers to the following questions and then, of course, making them operational:
· What are your goals? Are you trying to supplement a paycheck or social security, eke out a living for one, support a family, or make the Inc. 500 or Fortune 500 list? How much time will you devote to your business? (And that means working time spent acquiring, listing, shelving, picking, and packing books, not time spent reading bookseller message boards! Reading this book, however, counts as work time.) I believe a seller must set sales goals a month, a quarter, and a year into the future and must review performance against these goals with a cold analytic eye at the end of each period to determine what must be changed in his business plan.
· What is your ideal inventory level? How many desirable, appropriately priced new listings do you intend to list each day, each week, or each month? The answer to this last question is the single most important indicator in determining how successful you will be. Too many times I have seen booksellers complain about declining sales in remarks like this: “I set up shop six months ago with 1500 titles and sold over 500 of them the first month, but now even though I still have 700 titles listed I am only selling two or three books a day.” My answer is simple: “if you aren’t listing, you aren’t selling!” And the corollary of course is that you must constantly be refreshing the titles that have remained unsold the longest. I believe a seller must set daily or weekly goals for how many new titles will be added to his online inventory and how many previously listed titles will be refreshed. Refreshing previously listed titles, by the way, is not simply about lowballing. Sometimes it means re-linking a title, reviewing and occasionally changing its condition classification and/or description, and possibly increasing its price in a different classification. Sometimes it means deciding that it is time to donate a book to the local public library, so that one of your competitors can buy it from the library and try his hand at selling it online.
· What standards will you set for your business with respect to the quality and condition of books you will acquire for resale, promptness of your shipments, care and quality in packaging, and communications with buyers including sending prompt confirmation messages?
· How much space will you devote to your business and how will you organize and protect that space to ensure that books remain in the same condition and you can pick them efficiently for packing?
The decisions, of course, do not end there. What kind of online bookstore do you want to operate? Should you specialize? Are you going to focus on rare and antiquarian books, a general stock of contemporary used books, or some of both? One needs to establish working answers to these questions to get started, even if you believe that the answers may change over time as you gain experience and build your business.
· Unless you already have significant experience with collectible books, I strongly recommend that you begin by building your business as a “general stock” bookseller and deal primarily with more or less contemporary used books. These books are easy to acquire without much risk to your capital, they will be easy to list for sale, and if they are titles that have not already flooded the market and they are in desirable condition, they will be relatively easy to sell to the non-collecting customers who make up the vast majority of online book buyers. Then, if you are interested in venturing into the collectible book business, you will be able to build your knowledge as you occasionally come across collectible volumes and conduct the research appropriate to acquire, describe, price, sell, and ship them. You can make a good living at either end of this spectrum between selling collectibles and selling contemporary used books, or as a hybrid somewhere in the middle.
Where you ultimately situate yourself will probably depend upon what and who you enjoy dealing with, your ability to educate yourself on the finer points of either market, and your access to good sources of the books you want to sell. Nurture your capacity to develop a “feel” for the books with which you are dealing, and select a few areas where you are knowledgeable to develop expertise and specialization.
While it is important to determine the content of your store, it is equally important to establish its culture. I will not spend much time in these pages preaching to you about how you should behave as an online bookseller, but I have sufficient reverence for the profession that I feel compelled to state the following.
You are part of, or you are entering, a noble profession, an honorable, ages-old enterprise. Against our increasingly troublesome social backdrop of noise and rudeness, the independent bookseller has long stood for civility, for community, and of course for creativity and imagination. This tradition has been burnished by generations of the best independent booksellers, and we should expect no less of ourselves as online booksellers.
What does that translate into, either on a day-to-day operational basis or in establishing the branding and policies that you will present as your business identity to the online book-buying public?
First, let civility and helpfulness infuse every interaction with your customers, with other sellers, and with vendors from the staff at your local library sale to your contacts at Amazon (they will never admit it at Amazon, but they are our vendors, or at the very least our cyber-landlords). The tone of these interactions will of course come back to you, and your days (and your nights) will be more pleasant if what comes back is civil and helpful. To be sure, there will be customers who try your patience or tax your credulity, who try to get something for nothing, who expect you to pay for their errors, or, worst of all, who treat you rudely or disrespectfully. In some cases they have other issues and need a kind of help that you are neither equipped nor paid to provide for them. Regardless of that, you will be rewarded with greater peace of mind if you deal with them in a friendly, helpful, and professional manner and move on as quickly as possible. They may need the last word, they may need some form of validation from the interaction, they may even need their money back, but your greatest need – I urge you in the strongest possible terms – is to move on and get back to serving the 99.9 per cent of your customers and potential customers who actually deserve your time. Of course, you will be more easily able to move on if you take certain steps to protect your business, such as the use of electronic delivery confirmation, a good packaging system, order confirmation emails, judicious use of the Amazon A-to-Z Guarantee, and a conservative approach to rating and describing your books.
