“How did we progress in just a few years from relying on other companies to provide over half our business, to relying on them for only a tenth of our business?

“As an initial step, we invested in a more comprehensive inventory and customer database, a program tailor-made for our needs. Between the Covers Rare Books has been in business for several decades, but in the past few years we have been better equipped to study the sales trends within our own business because we invested in the ability to tag and track different types of sales.

 

At the same time, “we have actively concentrated on our institutional customers. This was a consumer base we gave only half-hearted attention as recently as five years ago. But since then, we have dedicated more of our office workforce to researching the holdings of libraries and quoting institutional customers. These efforts have paid great dividends.

In addition, he says, we very actively attempt to convert every single instance that we sell a book to a new customer into a repeat and long-standing relationship. How do we accomplish this?

 

“To start, we include one of our print catalogs with every purchase. When possible, we include a subject specific print catalog. The more specialized the book, the greater the likelihood that we will have subsequent sales.

 

In his view “the dealer's website is analogous to open shops of yesteryear. But most dealers treat their sites as if it were their business card, and nothing more.”

 

To him the most successful sites are “very much like a large building with rooms divided into different book subjects, but with large measures of spontaneity, serendipity, and personal selection thrown in.

 

”An open shop needs an attractive storefront window. Similarly a bookseller's home page should be lively and engaging. It should invite customers to come in, to spend time browsing, to make a purchase, and to want to return in the future. Like a good storefront window, a bookseller should display a sampling of inventory on the very first page and this sampling should change frequently. The design should be consistent with the image the bookseller wants to project, but it must also be attractive and original. It must convey the bookseller's identity and personality.

 

“Very few bookseller sites accomplish this. Most, including the sites of a number of major dealers, are horribly boring. They look very much alike and they are completely devoid of personality. Nothing about them invites the visitor to actually go deeper.

 

“Like any good open shop,” he continues, “a bookseller's site can and should contain a backroom. One of the ways we offer the equivalent of a backroom is to show recently acquired inventory on our own site for a month before it appears elsewhere.

 

“At our own web site,” he says, “we have an even more exclusive backroom in what we call ‘private pages.’ These are web pages featuring inventory quoted to particular individuals. They are password protected; they are not linked to the rest of our site, and they are not seen by Google or the rest of the internet. This can be very effective. Not long ago we sold a $30,000 archive using this method.

 

“A shop must have a good location,” Gregory continues. “On the internet location means optimized visibility by search engines; and by search engines I mean Google. We reprogrammed our site so that each book in our inventory had its own web page seen by Google, and the title of that page was the title of the book. This gives us a great deal of visibility when people search for that book in Google. Currently about two thirds of our web traffic comes from Google.