E-commerce

In the classic baseball movie Field of Dreams, the mantra repeated throughout the film is, "If you build it, they will come." Not so with websites.

When Brian Sweet of Trail's End Bookstore in Winthrop, Washington, wanted to refresh his store's offering of greeting cards, he took his quest for new suppliers to the newly redesigned Idea Exchange on the ABA Web site, www.BookWeb.org.

Holiday catalogs developed by the New Atlantic Independent, Pacific Northwest, Southeast, Southern California, and Upper Midwest booksellers associations are now featured on the BookSense.com hub site and are available for upload to participating BookSense.com sites. BookSense.com participants within each region were recently sent instructions about adding a regional holiday catalog to their site and their homepage.

This week, Book Sense and POS vendor Booklog announced that users of Booklog, Version 6, could begin selling and redeeming Book Sense gift cards directly from the cash register. Booklog is the third POS vendor to integrate with the Book Sense Gift Card Program, which is administered by Givex. Computac/Square One users processing credit cards though PCCharge have had integration since November 2003. And this past November, IBID, Version 14 began offering booksellers the option of processing Book Sense gift cards through an enhanced, optional feature.

On November 19, in a speech on the Senate floor, Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), after commending Congress for extending the moratorium on Internet access taxes for the next four years, called on Congress and President Bush to refocus their energies on his Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Act (SSUTA, S.1736). Enzi and Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced the bill, which would ensure that the tax system is fair to Main Street businesses, in October 2003.

Last weekend, BookSense.com brought a new production database and server online, and now, with the upgrade complete, it's time for BookSense.com participants and their customers to enjoy the increased speed and stability of bookstores' BookSense.com Web sites.

BookSense.com sites will experience significant downtime this weekend as a new production database and server are brought online. When completed, the upgrade will result in increased speed and stability for participants' Web sites. Most of the downtime is expected to occur during the first half of Sunday.

This week, Book Sense announced that booksellers can now process Book Sense Gift Cards through an enhanced and optional feature of IBID, Version 14. This new way to process gift cards is being offered to complement the other methods already available from Givex. (For more on the different ways to process Book Sense gift cards, click here.)

Over the weekend of November 13, BookSense.com will bring its new production database and servers online. While the result of the upgrade will mean increased speed and stability for BookSense.com participants' Web sites, BookSense.com members should be prepared for significant downtime on Saturday, November 13, and Sunday, November 14.

The success of a bookstore's Web site is directly dependent on the bookseller's efforts to market it, stressed Len Vlahos, BookSense.com director. "In some ways, a storefront retailer's Web site functions as an extension of the store, and, in other ways, as an additional location," Vlahos said.

Starting November 1, BookSense.com Co-op Reimbursement Program participants will be able to take advantage of a special offer from Algonquin Books. The publisher has created a promotion around Marlena de Blasi's A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure.

On Wednesday, October 6, Google announced the launch of a new search technology designed to help publishers sell books online, as reported by Reuters. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, plan to hold a press conference on Thursday, October 7, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which Reuters described as "an important showcase if the Internet search engine is to recruit the heavyweights of the book publishing industry."

Perpetrators of fraudulent order schemes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, as evidenced by the frequency and variety of scams reported by ABA member bookstores. Unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule for identifying a fraudulent order, but booksellers are being urged to err on the side of caution.

Among the most easily identifiable scams are orders originating in Nigeria or another African nation for large numbers of medical books, textbooks, technical books, or bibles. A stolen credit card is usually offered as the means of payment.

A number of booksellers with BookSense.com Web sites have recently reported a new twist to the problem of fraudulent orders. In addition to orders for large numbers of Bibles and medical texts, booksellers are now seeing fraudulent orders for popular trade titles, sometimes with expedited shipping, and with domestic billing and shipping addresses.

BookSense.com has begun offering detailed traffic reports on an individual store basis. This service, which was developed in response to booksellers' requests, provides data showing how many visitors come to a bookstore's site, which pages they're visiting, when they're visiting, and much more.