|
We've been looking at bookselling venues in the past issues, and this week we're getting up close and personal to Michael Tokman, president of Choosebooks.com. I thought this would be a good story, especially since it should contrast nicely with the interview we plan after the holiday with Hannes Blum of Abe.com.
Three friends began the ChooseBooks.com site with the idea of bringing back some of the user-friendly methods found on the old site Bibliofind. The principals are Michael Tokman of A-ha! Books, Kate Lindemann of Kate's Books and Poney Carpenter, the much-necessary IT guy who is aided by his brother Kendall. The rest of the Choosebooks team are Web artist Camille Lee, and staff members who are proficient in other languages: Silvia González and Doris Perez for Spanish; Anat Nidar-Levi for French and Claudia Haferkamp for German. (Michael speaks Russian.) They've been up and running for a year now and have 10070 sellers in their stable and over 7 million books listed on their site.
Bookologist: Why start another site now? Why did your team feel another bookselling site was needed?
Tokman: I've been selling books for 13 years. I started in mail order then went to a brick-and-mortar shop and began selling on the Internet in 1993. I've been on a number of bookselling sites since the days of Interloc and I began reading discussion lists at a time when Amazon purchased Bibliofind. Bibliofind was generating more sales for me and I was sorry to see it go. Choosebooks was a result of monitoring discussions and a response to what sellers were saying. We created a site that addresses those issues.
Bookologist: What makes Choosebooks different from other sites and how difficult was this to achieve?
Tokman: This was a joint effort, and our team looked at what developers had to offer. Our focus was the bookseller, not the program. We wanted flexibility and a program that understood bookselling. What we initially found were developers who tried to find the latest gimmicks without taking into consideration what other programs can do. What we ended up with was a program that was user driven and designed for both sellers and buyers.
Bookologist: Did you achieve your goal?
Tokman: We started live a year ago without the ability to process payments. For the first months the site was free. This summer Choosebooks instituted a payment process and began charging its sellers. Our goal was to create a site for booksellers, and I think we have succeeded.
Bookologist: What do you plan for next year?
Tokman: More improvements, obviously to improve the speed of our site. Another goal is to target buyers and draw them to our site. Among other improvements we want to implement multiple pictures and to promote a sister site ChooseAutographs. Basically we want to improve according to the feedback we receive.
Bookologist: When you look at your site, what is it that you want to see?
Tokman: Commerce is a major focus of ChooseBooks.com but I don't want to neglect the educational aspect of the site for buyers and sellers. It should be a facilitation site not just for shopping, a place where people can get information, providing people with extra services. We hope that ultimately this will lead to extra orders.
Bookologist: Are you pleased with the progress you've made?
Tokman: We grew much faster than anticipated. Most of it was by word of mouth and that's very good. What we're now finding is that sellers hear about us from buyers.
Bookologist: This week we had a letter to the editor from a buyer who encountered difficulty. She did not receive the book she ordered and paid for. How would ChooseBooks address this sort of problem?
Tokman: We have a code of dealer ethics we expect our members to obey. Bad sellers are asked to leave if there are too many complaints. We don't have a rating system because too many times this leads to a simplistic approach. What we do is take problems individually as they arise. We contact the parties and try to mediate the problem. It that's not working we place the individual seller "on vacation" and try again. If nothing is resolved we close the account. We try to give people plenty of opportunities to make things right.
Bookologist: What sort of problems have you encountered?
Tokman: The kind of unethical behavior we generally see is plagiarism and selling books that you don't own. This is when a seller takes another seller's listings and puts them online as their own. They steal the actual description someone else has written and when the book sells, they try to buy it from the original source and drop ship it to the customer. They make money by jacking up the price.
Bookologist: How does this differ from search services?
Tokman: Search services do not advertise books they do not own. They take orders and try to find books for customers. Our policy is that sellers must own the books they list online and they must use their own descriptions and not usurp another's intellectual property.
Bookologist: Why should our readers list on your site?
Tokman: We provide options and are flexible. We're always looking for new things that others have not tried before.
For more information about ChooseBooks, visit http://www.choosebooks.com.
|
