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Online Retailing Technology >> Surviving the Amazon Jungle
10/29/2004
“Once a school invests in setting up an etailing site of any kind, there’s not much additional cost in adding items to the list of things they can sell,” says Mike Kelly, senior VP of Nebraska Book Company.
Partnering for Dollars
To foster creativity in adding items to the mix, some leading etailing technology companies have partnered with nationwide vendors to enable academic customers to offer a virtual treasure trove of merchandise. Earlier this year, for instance, Nebraska Book inked a deal with Internet superstore Buy.com whereby students at any of the software company’s client-school etailing sites can purchase DVDs, CDs, and electronic equipment from Buy.com without leaving their campus bookstore sites. Under this agreement, a bookstore site is linked transparently to the Buy.com site, and the purchaser still thinks he or she is on the school bookstore site. When a purchase is completed, everybody profits: Buy.com makes its sale, Nebraska gets a finder’s fee, and the school earns a commission of anywhere from 1 to 10 percent.
Other vendors boast different types of partnerships with the same goal—increased access to products—in mind. With the help of eFollett (www.efollett.com), the online division of Follett Higher Education Group, more than 675 participating bookstores are tied behind the scenes to the same textbook database, giving users the impression that every bookstore boasts more than 1.2 million titles. In particular, the company has partnered with a variety of medical and eBook publishers, facilitating access to even more of these titles than Amazon boasts. Jill Blackstone, Internet Operations manager for eFollett, says the ultimate result is variety for the book-purchasing customer.
“College and university customers have told us this is what they’re looking for,” she says, pointing to the University of Notre Dame (IN) as a particularly impressive site partnership. “Etailing enables schools to go beyond the walls of brick-and-mortar and delve into [adventurous] projects.”
What’s Next
While such partnerships will inevitably become more common in campus etailing, some vendors and schools are blazing trails with technologies and strategies geared toward generating even more revenue. On the vendor side, both Missouri Book Systems and Nebraska Book Company are now testing technologies that will enable campus bookstores to track the purchases students make, and then send e-mail advertisements or promotions to those students, based upon those purchases. This model, similar to a form of marketing developed by Amazon.com, is designed to hook customers on “impulse buys,” or purchases they aren’t necessarily planning to make. The results could be impressive: Amazon d'esn’t release statistics on its success with the method, but some analysts estimate this type of customized marketing could add at least 5 to 10 percent in revenue annually.
There are other new technologies as well. Sequoia (the firm behind LuteWorld) recently unveiled “Campus Concierge,” through which customers can purchase and print out tickets (with an integrated service charge) for any number of events.
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