Back in 1995 when I first started selling books on the
internet my assumption was that the easiest way would be to photograph the
1,000 or so shelves of books in my bookshop, publish the roughly 2,000 photos –
one for each end of a shelf of books – on the internet in some sort of order,
and people would look at the pictures of the books, email me about the they
book they wanted, and I would email them back with the p&p cost plus the
cost of the book.
Looking back twenty years from now when the vast majority of
secondhand books are available online for a price including postage that is
less than it would cost you or me to post them, let alone pay for the packing
materials or pay the fees to list them on the internet, this naïve approach
seems humorous.
Now when a customer buys a book from us it is likely that
the internet will be involved, either to make sure they are paying a fair
price, to find out something about the book – is it the next one in the series?
– or to check if they have already got it.
I had a non internet book disaster in the Oxfam Bookshop in
Deal recently, I piled up about two or three hundred pounds worth of books with
the intention of looking them up on the internt to see if I could sell them at
a profit. I guess if things had worked out I would have bought about half of
them. I couldn’t get a signal, so no internet connection and therefore no sale.
So what can I get out of a website for my bookshop?
Well from a sales point of view I can produce something
where you the customer can decide whether or not it’s worth bothering to come
here to the town centre in Ramsgate.
Obviously I can say that I have about 25,000 books in stock,
but this wouldn’t be difficult to achieve with the dregs of a few big jumble
sales or boot fairs, so I have to have some way of showing that the books are a
bit better than this.
Obviously I can keep on saying that our prices are
competitive with the online price and usually a fair bit cheaper, which helps
if we have the right book in stock.
From my own point of view I now find I need to know whether
we have a particular book in stock before buying it, which means that I need to
be able to look on my smartphone at any particular shelf in my bookshop, so I
don’t buy the Martina Cole books I already have in stock and I do buy the ones
I haven’t got.
So by using a mixture of, Blogger, seat of the pants
timewarp web publishing, a smartphone that automatically publishes photos to
Picasa, I am developing a new website for the bookshop.
Using Blogger overcomes the really difficult bit which is
getting it to work fast on a phone without having to make up different sized
images.
So lots of posts on http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/
which actually link to the browse our books part of the main bookshop website http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/id10.htm
so far I have done the military book section and the first three letters of the
fiction alphabets.
The pictures of books illustrating this post are on sale in
my bookshop today, I don’t have them listed on any of the internet book sites.
I see the Save Manston lot are getting excited about a digger being on site and throwing all sorts of accusations around...... Southern Water doing legitimate work !!
ReplyDeleteWhat they do not realise is that all they are achieving is just winding the owners up. The owners are drawing up their own plans for the site and whilst that happens the CPO will go nowhere. The owners might just drag their feet a little bit longer and noone can do anything about it....