Saturdays

A lot of the information contained in this topic is, indeed, contained elsewhere in this document. This topic was written at a later time, and from a new vantage point..; after we have sold a good number of BookAccents accounts, and have been in the bookseller business for almost four years.

Why have I taken the time to write this information? I am a bit selfish. I want you to succeed in the bookselling business. I want to share our success and failures with you. I want you to become one of our BookAccents users. I have found that many of our users are starting a business for the first time, and certainly can benefit from knowledge anyone is willing to share. Unfortunately I have seen some business go bust. Most of the time I feel it was due to a naive misunderstanding of how to trade and sell books. Others have had such a narrow field of view that success was unlikely.

I am not saying that I know all of the ins and outs, but we have been very fortunate and successful both in selling in our store and on the Internet. Since we will not be competitors, I am happy to help you in any way possible.

You know, if you would visit our store on any week day, then again on Saturday, you would swear that you are visiting an entirely different business. I guess we planned it that way, but in any case, that is surely how it is.

During the week we have a very steady parade of our week-day customers. They are typically middle aged women who buy tons of romance and general fiction used books. This is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but there is a vast, untapped market if you settle for just one class of customer. Saturdays are different. We have kids, teens and men buying entirely different products.

We have special problem, that I hope you do not. Our store is located where it is because we own the building, and opened our store defensively. That is, we had a significant amount of unused floor space, in need of a money making venture. Our building is located on the outskirts of a business park. It is not in any type of mall or shopping area. It stands alone. It does, however have a few thing going for it.

We quickly noticed that we were not as busy as expected on Saturdays. Our typical customers were not shopping in our store on Saturday. What to do?

All of this being the case, we decided to carry everything possible from Ingram, and fill with what we could from Diamond. I won't mention the names I called the rep from the third distributor.

As of this writing, we have been selling magazines and comic books for exactly one year. We have over 300 titles, in combination. The magazines are a total failure. Even though we can return all that we do not sell, there is a great deal of labor involved in keeping up with the inventory and returning the unsold copies. Additionally, we have about two thousand dollars tied up in this inventory. On the brighter side... since we need only return the cover, our employees get free magazine subscriptions.

The comic books are another story. We are still not making a profit on comics since we cannot return the issues we do not sell (from Diamond), but we are getting closer and closer each month (to profitability). We do, however draw an entirely new clientele because of the new products. Unless you have a great deal of spare floor space, I recommend that you do not try either comics or magazines.

As of this date, we have removed all comics and magazines from the store. Neither one was profitable when considering the amount of labor required to order, stock, and return these items.

We removed both the comic books and magazines, replacing them with additional bookshelves and books.

When we opened our store, almost 100% of the books were used paperbacks. Because of financial reasons, I'll bet that is your situation too. We opened the doors with about 16,000 used books. Many of these books were unsalable, and used just for fill. As better stock was traded, we replaced the junk with these during the first year. If you are doing things right, you will soon have a large surplus of traded books.

Because our customers were coming to buy romance and general fiction, it followed that the books that were being traded in were also of those genres. When males customers would visit, they generally did not buy, as we did not have the books in which they were interested. And that is the worst thing that can happen... an new face, but no sale. He won't return, and he will tell his friends "Those guys don't have any books".

This is bad if you are spending a great deal of money on advertising. You are drawing, but not selling:

As of now, things are really popping with our New Book Sales. Saturday is now our busiest day. More than half of the books that we sell on the weekends (we open for 4 hrs. on Sunday, too) are new books, and about 1/3 of the books that we sell on other days are also new, from Ingram. Our new books b ring in a continuous stream of new customers. Once they drop into the store to "check us out", they are amazed at the depth of the titles we stock. You would be amazed at the amount of positive comments that we receive from first time visitors.

The reality is that on their first visit, the majority of their purchases are new books. When the check out, they then ask question relating the our used books and trading policies.