Internet Sales

This topic attempts to fully describe our Optional capabilities for Internet sales and tracking.

 

See The Internet

 

A very large portion of our yearly sales volume deals with Internet sales from such sites as Amazon, half.com and eBay.  The competition is stiff.  Profit margins are generally quite slim when selling on the Internet, therefore a high level of efficiency is absolutely necessary, (if you wish to sell your items profitably).  Since margins are so tight, so you need to do a large volume in order to make it worth your while.  You also need to have a good understanding about how to buy books.  This comes with experience, and a lot of help from reliable data determining whether you should buy books, based on your ability to move them.  All of the major remainder dealers send us computerized list of their books offered for sale.  We carefully parse these lists the moment they become available, and only purchase the most promising books.  Selling the books is easy, but learning how to buy books that you can sell for at a reasonable profit is the name of the game.

 

 

 

So you think that you are ready to give the Internet a try.  There are really three levels at which you can approach launching your sales campaign,

 

  1. Take the used books in your store and list them.  This has a very low risk factor, as you are not investing any additional funds into the project.  You will be surprised at how much you can get for some books, but you will be disappointed to find that the majority of the books you already have in stock have no value on the Internet.  That is... the price reaped form the books is generally not worth the effort in handling them.  You are doing this just for fun.
     

  2. Buy some books specifically to be listed on the Internet.  This becomes a bit more risky in that you now have an additional investment in books.  Many times these books will not sell well to the clientele that you currently have in your business, so if the books do not sell, you will be really hurting.  You must phase into this.  Find out what will and will not sell before buying large quantities.  Additionally you have these new problems:

    1. Go whole hog and develop a new cost center with Internet Sales.  This will generally require additional equipment, additional employees, and a new management philosophy.   The possible profits are great.  The risk factor is also high.

 

 

 

On an average day, we sell between 500 and 700 books on these (Internet) sites (Amazon and half.com). I have posted some of our numbers below, as I like to "put up or shut up".  These numbers should leave no doubt that we are serious about selling on the Internet, and the software that we have recently developed has met the challenge.  Frankly, we couldn't do this level of business without our software. It would take an additional 20 employees to keep up with the pricing, repricing and shipping necessary to keep competitive.  We do so with just one.

 

We launched our newest software version in October, 2004, and didn't start this half.com seller account until November of 2004.  Remember, they said they were shutting down the site in October, 2004.  Yep, it was a good Christmas Season!  We plan on doing about $3 Million in Internet sales in 2005.

 

 

 

 

 

All of the numbers (from Amazon and half.com) shown above were captured on the 5th. of Feb. 2005.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The number highlighted shows our Ingram Purchases of new books last year (2004).  Because of out Internet sales, our Ingram sales rep had a wonderful Christmas, too.

 

The complete software package (automatic, intelligent pricing, re-pricing and electronic ordering) is NOT included with the Internet sales module.    We are, however, willing to negotiate terms of usage for serious Internet Sellers.

 

 

Our optional software (that is generally available) watches for email sales posting from the various sites, and "parses" these letters.  We extract the sales voucher number and created a record in the Internet Sales Database with the voucher number as he key.  We save the ISBN, sales and shipping charge information, and the customers' shipping addresses.

 

In a nutshell, this is how it works:

  1. We use our Internet listing software to compile a listing of selected books and automatically, but Intelligently list them to various Internet sites.

  2. We periodically use our Internet spiders to Intelligently re-evaluate our current listing prices and change them, if/ when necessary. This feature is not available with our basic Internet Package.

     

    Don't confuse our software with the commercially available junk.  Remember, I said Intelligently.

     

  3. When a book is sold on the Internet, the selling site sends a confirming email to us.  Although in its raw state the email has important information, we found that the format is not very useful if not enhanced.

  4. Our software intercepts the email, and parses the data.  A new page is produced from the information supplied.

  5. The new page is automatically routed to a dedicated on-line Internet Order Printer located in our bulk storage area.

  6. The books are picked, and invoiced through the deferred process. We use the Deferred Billing Mode to process these books.  By first scanning the Book Inventory Number, then the sales voucher number, the transaction is flagged as being completed.

     

    Deferred Billing Mode is a Cash Register function used when there will be no real cash received at that time (when balancing at night, the cash will not be present).  For example, you payment will come as a PayPal or Amazon direct deposit payment.

     

    Although no cash is received, all other functions will be automatically performed. (such as inventory)

     

  7. These books are then moved to our shipping area.  The book is placed on an electronic scale, the voucher number bar-code is scanned, and third party software, Dazzle's Envelope Manager.

 

 

 

The next two screen images show how an item is bought on Amazon.com

 

 

 

 

 

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