Bookseller Digest UK

Get ready for the Christmas run-up

Start preparing your inventory for the Christmas run-up. Use the time before the Christmas rush begins to ensure you have uploaded your best collectable books, volume sets, boxed books and any other book related items that will be well received as gifts. Make sure that they are nicely presented so that buyers are encouraged to purchase their Christmas gifts from you.

We have put together our best Christmas Inventory Tips for you to help ensure that you are using all the tools available to optimise the availability of your your books. 

Signed Books - are always a big hit at Christmas, so this year we will be doing special features in our buyer communication in the run-up to Christmas. We will be showcasing the signed books available on AbeBooks. If you want to see your books amongst those, make sure you have uploaded all your signed copies.  If you ensure that you have a good description and a nice picture of the signed books you have available, buyers will be more inclined to buy from you. Remember to tag those titles as signed in your book data -  our Customer Service team are available to support you, should you need assistance in updating your book data.

 Uploading pictures - is not just a tip for Christmas. If you have pictures available you can increase your sales by between 30% - 40%, buyers like to see what they are buying - especially if a book is quite expensive or rare. Having pictures available also allows you to participate in other special promotions throughout the year. You will also be able to showcase your books in the Favourites from our Booksellers section of the Rare Book Room, which we promote regularly in buyer newsletters.  If you do not have pictures available we cannot feature your books, so it is really worthwhile investing some time into getting some nice pictures taken.

Not sure how to get your pictures online? Visit our Online Help Pages for instructions. 

For those booksellers who do not have a facility that enables them to change the size and resolution of pictures, we would also like to recommend that you look online at some of the freeware available. We recommend Paint.Net, which allows you to resize and change the quality of the picture accordingly.

Book Descriptions - are your tool for helping buyers find your books in their searches. Use your book descriptions to their full, to offer the buyer all the information they need to know. You have 4000 characters to use, so you can give a comprehensive overview of the biblographic information, the condition of the book and also part of the synopsis, for example. A more extensive description, along with a good picture can really make a difference to a buyer when deciding whose book to buy.

Why is synopsis information important? For those buyers who do not know exact book titles, and where the title of a book does not really reflect the contents, buyers will be searching by keyword for a genre, a character or the topic of the book. They will only find your books if you have that information available. By including part of the synopsis, or even the table of contents a buyer will be more likely to find your books in their searches. You can add information to your book descriptions at any time, you simply need to make the change and upload the newly updated file. We recommend that you start with the more expensive titles when updating your book data.

Keywords - is another tool for making your books even more visible. They should be as book specific as possible. Using generic words, history for example, will mean that your book(s) show as one of several million search results and it becomes difficult to find your book(s). By being more content specific, for example - 18th century history Devon Cornwall you will greatly reduce the number of search results and help the buyer get to your books more quickly.

Adding foreign keywords will ensure that your listings are also visible to other English speaking European buyers who use foreign keywords out of habit. Click here for a translated list of some of the more common foreign keywords in English – French – German.

Competitive Shipping - Make sure that you are offering competitive shipping terms. Buyers will want to know that they will receive their orders in time for Christmas. Ensure that your shipping rates and speeds really reflect the services you can offer. You can also update your Shipping Terms to explain when the last pre-Christmas shipping date will be for your books. Click here to find more information on updating your Shipping Terms or any other aspect of your Personal Information on your bookseller account.

Free shipping - You may wish to consider offering Free Domestic Shipping on orders as a special offer in the run up to Christmas. 

Catalogues - Ensure that you have some catalogues available to make your books easier to navigate for browsing buyers. You have the facility to enter up to 100 catalogues. Contact our Customer Service team to find out how best to add catalogues to your inventory.

The Times' "Webwatch", by Mark Bridge

Times correspondant, Mark Bridge, put AbeBooks at the top of his list of the best online shopping websites in an article on October 24th.

Again this is not just praise for AbeBooks as a website, but also for our booksellers who provide the wide range of inventory that buyers enjoy searching through and the good customer service that you offer.

To view the full article, click here.

"Let them entertain you" Which? Online Shopping Survey

Consumer Association Which? published the results of their online shopping survey last week. The consumer association had questioned over 8,000 internet shoppers about their online purchasing experiences. 

With less than 1 in 5 participants ever having had a negative experience in buying online, AbeBooks came top of the entertainment category. This is pretty big praise for us and we would like to take this opportunity to thank our booksellers for the great selection of books they have available and the excellent service they offer to buyers, which helps us to get to the top of the charts.

Review the full survey summary:Download which_online_survey_nov_08.pdf

Completion Rates Tips

As communicated back in July, the completion rating requirement has been increased from 80% to 85%.

As we continue to monitor and help improve booksellers Completion Rates, we would like to take the opportunity to thank all those sellers who have been actively working with us to improve the number of their completed orders. The results have been very good so far, with tens of thousands more books actually being delivered to AbeBooks buyers. We look forward to further improvements in the future and are very happy to help any seller who would like assistance in improving their completion rates.

To support you in maintaining your completion rates, or indeed to assist you in increasing your ratings to reach the new 85% requirement, we have some best practise tips for you. 

Keeping your inventory up-to-date:

• Ensure that your AbeBooks inventory is updated with those titles that you have sold thorugh other channels. You can upload daily delnum (delete number) files of the titles you sell through other channels. Alternatively, you can update your listings directly online using the Online Inventory Management system. If you do this you will need to make sure that your main book file has also been updated to ensure that those books are not reloaded as For Sale at a later date.

• Homebase Users: Mark titles no longer available as [Sold] and upload the updated file.

• Upload your complete inventory on a weekly basis to refresh your listings.

• Do a purge and reload on a monthly basis to ensure that any transmissional errors are corrected.

• Make sure that you do regular inventory checks to ensure that you are listing titles that you can provide. For more information on managing your inventory, please review our online help pages: Upload and manage your inventory

• Avoid buyer disappointment by listing single titles on only one sales channel at any one time.

Managing your account:

• Check your orders online in your account to ensure that you have not missed any - emails are sent for every order, but may get lost in transmission, therefore, we store a record of all orders on your account. For more information on order processing, please review our online help pages: 

How do I receive notifications for ordered books?

• Never let orders Expire - these will be held against your completion ratings. Click here to review which orders are calculated against your Bookseller Rating.

• Review the Quick Returns and Refunds Guide to ensure you are familiar with what the correct reason codes are. If you enter an incorrect reason  you could inadvertantly reduce your Completion Rate.
  
  • e.g. if a buyer has not paid for a book and you simply reject the order as opposed to marking it as an incomplete sale this will negatively affect your rating.

• To avoid unnecessary refunds from being initiated keep in touch with your buyers. Good customer service not only increases buyer confidence in your services, but can also prevent buyers from initiating refunds too early.

• If in doubt for any reason contact our Customer Service team who will be happy to assist you. If you are not sure of the correct return reason, or if you are having trouble with your inventory or account, please do let us know so that we can immediately help, and keep the negative affects to your Bookseller Rating to a minimum.

30th Annual Conference on Book Trade History

The 30th annual conference on Book Trade History takes place between Saturday 29th and Sunday 30th November 2008 in London at The Foundling Museum.

The subject for this years 2 day conference will be Advertising and Promotion of Print from the Fifteenth Century. Guest speakers will be exploring how book promotion has developed over the centuries, from the earliest book advertisements in the fifteenth century to selling books online in the twenty-first.

There will be 8 guest speakers, including Michael Harris, co-founder with Robin Myers of the annual conferences on book trade history, Charles Benson, Keeper of Early Printed Books at Trinity College and  Udo Goellmann Manager, Sales & Accounts at AbeBooks Europe.

For more information and the full list of speakers, you can visit:

http://www.abainternational.com/bulletin/booktrade.htm

Update your orders with a tracking number

When you process orders, you have the choice to ship via a trackable method. If you choose to use a trackable method, the tracking information should be added to the order information after processing.

To enter tracking information to a previously processed order please follow the instructions below:

1. Sign On to your AbeBooks.com bookseller account
2. Click [Process Your Orders] from the Quick Links on the right of the Members Menu
3. Locate the order to which you would like to add tracking information and click [Review Order]
4. In the Order Information Box, you can enter the shipping company and tracking number
5. Click [Update] to save the tracking information

Why Should I Use Tracking Information?
The use of a trackable means of shipment, especially for rare or expensive books, is highly recommended by AbeBooks for two reasons:

1. Using a trackable means of shipment reassures the buyer that the order has been shipped, and that they are dealing with a serious bookseller. It allows them to follow the shipment at all times and they know when they can expect the book to arrive.
2. Tracking information acts as insurance for you. Should a book not arrive by the estimated delivery date, you can provide tracking information to the buyer where appropriate and track the package yourself on the USPS Web site to determine why it did not arrive to the buyer.

We have more tips and advice on tracking orders on our Online Help pages.

Chelsea Book Fair

For those who are in the London area on Friday and Saturday next week, remember to pay a visit to the Antiquarian Book Fair in Chelsea and view the fantastic range of books, available for sale.

You will find over 70 top antiquarian book dealers from the UK and overseas, exhibiting their treasures at the 2 day fair this year.

The fair, held at the Chelsea Old Town Hall on King's Road, opens to the public on Friday, 7^th November from 2pm -7pm and continues over to Saturday,

8th November, from 11am - 5pm.

AbeBooks Shipping Solutions Survey

Have you taken the Shipping Solutions Survey? If not, here is your chance to have your say about what your shipping needs and requirements are.

Your feedback will be of great value for the development of new shipping solutions that we can offer on AbeBooks in the future, and we do hope that you will take a few minutes of your time to complete the survey. 

BEWARE: fraudulent buyer behaviour

We would like to notify you of some fraudulent buyer activity that a few booksellers have been subject to recently.

Please be very wary of any buyers acting along similar lines to the scenario shown below.

The buyer contacts booksellers, usually outside of the AbeBooks system, using the guise of an interested collector wanting to purchase several of the bookseller's more expensive titles that they will use to open their own bookselling business. They explain that they would like to pay by cheque and that they would like to arrange for the payment to be made.

Once this has been arranged with the bookseller, the cheque arrives, always totalling more than the original order was actually worth. At this point the buyer contacts the bookseller explaining that there was a mix up and that the wrong cheque was sent - they then proceed to request that the seller keep the cheque and simply transfer the difference of the order total and the amount on the cheque back to them via a Western Union account, or to an alternative recipient.

Please be advised that this very likely to be a fraudulent buyer. We advise you not to give any bank information to them and not to send any books.

Indexing Delays

As you may know we are experiencing some indexing delays, which means that some of your updates may not yet appear online within the usual time frame. We are aware of this issue and are working very hard to ensure that all updates are applied as soon as possible.

Please avoid re-uploading your files as this could create further delays. Remember that you can check your Book Count Report in the Members Menu to make sure we have received your files.

• Sign on to your AbeBooks account.
• Select [Your Books] from the Members Menu.
• Click [Yesterday’s Billable Listings: xx].
• Check the “Recently Uploaded Files – Status Report” section for your files. If the status is “Listings loaded into database,” then we’ve received your file and your books will be searchable soon if they aren’t already.

We will keep you posted of updates and thank you for  your patience in the meantime.

As you may know we are experiencing some indexing delays, which means that some of your updates may not yet appear online within the usual time frame. We are aware of this issue and are working very hard to ensure that all updates are applied as soon as possible.

Please avoid re-uploading your files as this could create further delays. Remember that you can check your Book Count Report in the Members Menu to make sure we have received your files.

• Sign on to your AbeBooks account.
• Select [Your Books] from the Members Menu.
• Click [Yesterday’s Billable Listings: xx].
• Check the “Recently Uploaded Files – Status Report” section for your files. If the status is “Listings loaded into database,” then we’ve received your file and your books will be searchable soon if they aren’t already.

We will keep you posted of updates and thank you for  your patience in the meantime.