Above the Treeline, Inc. is introducing a new offering within its Edelweiss+Analytics portfolio for booksellers. The new “Shelf Report” will strengthen the company’s mission to help book professionals “work better, read more” by making inventory and sales analysis more intuitive and actionable for independent booksellers.

The new Shelf Report will be provided semi-annually to stores that subscribe to the Summit tier of Edelweiss+Analytics starting in February 2019, but stores may upgrade to more frequent reporting if desired. The Shelf Report benchmarks the store against the aggregate performance of hundreds of other independent bookstores on four key measures of sales and inventory health, across 45 genres. The measures are:

• Freshness: What portion of the inventory is selling?
• Relevance: How does the inventory compare when it comes to ownership of top titles?
• Hit Rate: How have new titles “hit” compared to peers?
• Turnover: How many times does inventory turnover annually compared to peers?

Booksellers can drill down from the overall assessment to genre-specific assessments and then click into specific title lists that drive action. This new report complements the sales and inventory management tools available in the Summit tier of Edelweiss+Analytics by monitoring performance over time and driving improvement efforts.

For the past several months, Above the Treeline has been working with early adopters of the report to improve formatting and actionability, and stores have been very enthusiastic.

“The Shelf Report made it clear what we could do better and motivated us to take the next step. It helped my team see the books we have in relationship to other similar stores as well as bigger stores so that we could look at our inventory from the outside in,” said Kira Wizner, owner of Merritt Bookstore [4] in Millbrook, New York.

The Edelweiss platform is used by over 120,000 book professionals to sell, discover, and order new titles. It hosts digital catalogs from all major publishers and over 95 percent of U.S. frontlist titles. Retailers use Edelweiss to stay on top of new titles, access advanced review copies, communicate with publishers, and create orders.

“Over 20,000 booksellers use Edelweiss, and we recognize that they all wear multiple hats. They are trying to get more done in less time, and we’re hoping that the Shelf Report will help them do so. The Shelf Report serves as a regular ‘check-up’ for bookstores and complements the robust reporting within Edelweiss+Analytics. It makes inventory management more data-driven but also more fun and engaging,” said John Rubin, founder and CEO of Above the Treeline, the company behind Edelweiss+.

The basic Edelweiss platform is a free service for book professionals, and Edelweiss+Analytics is an affordable upgrade for bookstores. Edelweiss+Analytics for retailers has two tiers: Basecamp and Summit. Both tiers involve integrating a store’s POS data into Edelweiss+ through automated data feeds. Basecamp provides basic tools that speed up the buying process by providing easy access to data about comparable titles. Summit provides this in addition to a full suite of tools that help bookstores efficiently manage title selection, returns, and inventory management to accelerate turns.

The introduction of the Shelf Report comes on the heels of the full integration of Analytics into Edelweiss+ in 2018 for booksellers. Subscribing stores can now access their store data and analytics throughout Edelweiss+, creating a single sign-on, one-stop-shop for efficient workflow.

“For over 15 years now, we’ve offered analytical tools to booksellers, and it’s really at the heart of what we do. Our goal with the Shelf Report is to provide decision intelligence to bookstores to help them succeed against competitive pressures,” said Ruth Bradstreet, analytics product manager at Above the Treeline.

Learn more about Edelweiss+Analytics for booksellers [5]. The Above the Treeline team will also be presenting on the Shelf Report at Winter Institute [6], where they will also be available for meetings at the Consultation Station [7].