With Writing Show host, Paula B.

DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN TO “HOW NOT TO RUN AN ONLINE BOOKSTORE, EPISODE 6″ MP3 HERE

And now I come to perhaps the juiciest part of my story: working with Amazon. Amazon is not a topic you can be neutral about. Everyone’s got a story, everyone’s got an opinion. I’d love to hear about your experiences with and feelings about Amazon. Here is just a small window on mine.

We never thought we’d sell books through Amazon. When I say that, I don’t mean we thought we’d fail at selling books there. I mean we never thought we’d use them as an intermediary. After all, they were our competition, if you want to consider that a giant stepping on a fly is actually competition for the fly. But also, Alan and I had this grand vision that involved doing things Amazon didn’t and couldn’t. Being personal, for one thing. Having subject expertise, for another. But unfortunately, price is everything when you’re selling books online, and no matter how sociable, knowledgeable, or interesting we were or could have been, we couldn’t compete on that. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We finally built the store, but no one came. I had pushed and prodded Alan to write a quick and dirty ecommerce Web site, but I needn’t have bothered. We had done a little marketing, but to no avail. We got little traffic and, I suspect because of our prices, no sales. It may also have been that no one knew us, and when no one knows you online, no one trusts you. But even if that hadn’t been the case, we weren’t meeting Amazon’s ridiculously low prices because we couldn’t. Book buyers shop around, and everyone checks Amazon. There was no way people would buy from an unknown company like The Compulsive Creative unless we were offering rock bottom prices, which we couldn’t do.

We did discount nicely. Almost never did we charge full price, except for some software. Adobe software, for example, comes with almost no discount, but when you’re catering to creatives, you pretty much have to offer it anyway. The same was true for quite a lot of the software we sold, which included drawing, modeling, painting, and various music programs. Even when we did get good discounts, so did everyone else, so we had no advantage.

I had sold a few of my own used books through Amazon before and knew roughly how the process worked, although I had never sold in quantity, which is quite a different thing. Still, we thought maybe we should try using their marketplace, or that of ABE Books or one of the other stores that caters to third-party merchants. After examining the terms for each store, we settled on Amazon. At first, we thought we could get customers for our own Web site that way. After a while, we discovered that Amazon prohibits marketplace sellers from soliciting direct sales. That really annoyed us, but we realized they’d boot us off if they caught us doing that, and with our own traffic so meager, we couldn’t afford that.

Continues....

Purchase the entire series, including the never-heard Episode 9, at the Amazon Kindle Store: