New Service for Booksellers -- BuyBundle
- By Carl Burnham
BuyBundle offers to promote books on the internet.
By Carl Burnham
Since January 2007, we at SouthpointBooks have been using a new service called BuyBundle. Whether books, audio, software, or videos, listings are free, and items are also listed through the new Google Base. If an Amazon Marketplace seller, inventory is synchronized automatically between Amazon and Google Base. When a book is sold, a 10 percent commission is charged, and payments are made via Paypal.
Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss with Venkatesh Akella, co-founder of BuyBundle, their new service and how it benefits booksellers.
1. Please elaborate on how BuyBundle came into being and the unique aspects of your service.
BuyBundle is the result of technology and ideas that we have been developing and refining over the past many months to create a better marketplace. The unique aspect of BuyBundle is its ability to take advantage of the integration of search engines with product catalogs, as we are seeing with Google base. This changes the traditional marketplace and comparison shopping game. We hope to make it possible for our sellers to easily build a strong relationship with their online customers
2. Do the founders have a background as booksellers?
Founders have sold books occasionally but they do not have a background in bookselling. We know technology and we will work with our sellers to build all the right features to deliver sales to them and value to the customer. We encourage our sellers to share with us what they would like this marketplace to look like.
3. How many sellers are you averaging now?
We are very pleased with our success, support and encouragement that we have had over the last 3 months of launching our service. We have hundreds of sellers that are in the marketplace and giving us their valuable insights to make it a better place.
4. What about allowing for the hosting of book images for older, non-ISBN books?
We are constantly looking to expand the capabilities of our platform. The above would be examples of features that we will introduce over time.
|
New Service for Booksellers -- BuyBundle
- By Carl Burnham
none
5. Any plans for allowing sellers to offer specials for certain books or to have customers enter a special code to receive a discount?
Absolutely. Allowing even small sellers to offer promotions, discounts, coupons etc. like the large retailers is a cornerstone of our platform and strategy. We will be unveiling some of these features in due course.
6. Another concept would be to be able to sell books in a bulk lot and to sell ephemera items (magazines, pamphlets, etc.). Any plans for this?
We do not have any plans for magazines, pamphlets etc. at this time.
7. What about allowing for alternate shipping pricing for priority and international orders?
This is a feature request we have received from our sellers and we will be incorporating it in a future release.
8. Google checkout is planned as an alternative to Paypal for your next release. Can you elaborate when this will become available?
There are some issues with Google checkout at this time. It is still not widely accepted or used. PayPal is still the payment method of choice for online sellers. So, we have gone with that. When Google checkout becomes robust and stable, we will offer it on BuyBundle.
9. What do you anticipate the next release will include, and when will it become available?
The nice thing about the web is that there is a continuous stream of improvements. There was a major release last week. We expanded the service to include audio, video, games, software, etc. We added many new features to our platform -- search across stores, add individual items to the inventory, ability to specify a minimum price for the inventory items etc. We are constantly working on improving the classification of items and the relevance of listed items in Google base. Supporting more formats, integration with various inventory management systems, improving our order processing system are some of the things we plan to do in the future.
|
New Service for Booksellers -- BuyBundle
- By Carl Burnham
none
10. What about long-range plans?
The existing marketplaces and comparison shopping engines that most sellers rely on are being challenged by the direct integration of search engines with product catalogs, e.g. Google Search integration with Google Base. This creates a whole new marketplace. We want to power this next generation of marketplace by empowering the sellers so they can focus on giving the best deals to their buyers instead of just competing on single item prices. To bring about the next generation marketplace, we plan to involve the seller community to best understand the new needs and we plan to build a strong R&D team to deliver on the right solution.
From initial sales we have received, BuyBundle holds some promise for booksellers in providing more avenues to market their books online. It will be interesting to see it further develop as a more robust service. Meanwhile, Ebay will be allowing select Half.com booksellers on April 1st to easily list their books via Ebay Express, which we will be participating in and posting results via our site blog. We are also testing the new Barnes and Noble beta, available for only a few booksellers. So far, our results have been very positive. Look for my interview with B&N and an article on their beta program in next month’s issue.
Carl Burnham
SouthpointBooks.com
|