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The Bookologist interviewed Hannes Blum, President of ABE.com, an online bookselling site based in Canada. An introduction to Mr. Blum can be found online:
http://www.bookologist.com/cab/abu/y204/m02/bk0021/s03
Bookologist: First and foremost, let's get to know you a little better.
Blum: I co-founded JustBooks in 1999 based on the enthusiasm my colleagues and I developed for the combination of used, rare and out-of-print books with the Internet, and my desire to become an entrepreneur. As PhD students we got the idea originally based on the fact that it was very hard to find used textbooks in Europe. We knew ABE was already pretty successful in the North American market but we were convinced that this was just the start of new market in the world of books and we wanted to be a part of it in Europe. So, since then I worked in online used and rare bookselling in Germany, the UK, France and now North America. Being Managing Director of a small, growing company requires you to get to know pretty much every function of the business. Before my PhD studies I worked for the Boston Consulting Group where I learned a lot about several industries in a wide variety of international projects for large and midsize companies.
Just in case: in my spare time I used to do a lot of sports (tennis, golf, soccer) and my wife Claudia and I love to travel. We got to know each other while backpacking through Asia. Now - since 9 months - I have a brand new passion - my son Benedict Sebastian, who was born here in Victoria BC.
Bookologist: What made you start a company like JustBooks? And why did Abe choose to acquire it rather than other online selling services such as bookavenue.com or usedbookcentral.com?
Blum: The acquisition of JustBooks was the result of Abebooks' analysis of the European market. During that phase, Abebooks installed a board of outside directors. One of them was the CEO of a successful international company who urged the management to explore the opportunities of the growing market in Europe. With the knowledge of the North American market Abebooks knew that it would be very hard to compete with a strong established competitor in Europe. Vice versa, we at JustBooks knew the same about the already much bigger North American market. Consequently, we both saw a lot of advantages in creating a worldwide network, and this made the acquisition possible and very smooth.
Bookologist: A changeover of management often heralds a change in service for companies. What changes have happened and will happen with Abe?
Blum: I am convinced that Abe is by far the best venue for bookselling on the Internet and I am not planning to change that! However, there are a lot of things we can do better. Just recently, we totally renewed our technical infrastructure with a very significant investment which to create a much faster and more reliable site.
Bookologist: Can you tell us why an online bookseller should choose Abe.com over other selling venues? Especially, why should a seller choose Abe partnerships rather than the same partnerships with Alibris?
Blum: Abebooks is the best venue in terms of price and value for service, for selling books on the Internet. I can provide some specific examples:
- only Abe allows sellers to set their own shipping rates with 100% reimbursement
- of the major sites, only Abe is a books-only website
- only Abe offers free inventory management software
- only Abe offers 1-800 live, telephone customer service
- only Abe offers one upload to international sites featuring buyer currency options
- only Abe offers sellers the opportunity to process their own credit card transactions
- only Abe sets a maximum commission price - booksellers do not pay higher commissions on books sold for more than $500
As well, Abebooks consistently provides booksellers with a better deal than other online book retailers since we don't mark up the book price and we're not competing directly with the bookseller; Abebooks is not trying to sell its own books on the site.
Bookologist: Where is Abe marketing for customers?
Blum: Perhaps the best way to answer this is to talk about the "front end" and "back end" of our marketing efforts. We use these terms to describe the marketing we do online (backend) and what we do out in the world or "offline" (front end). Both of these areas have the same aim: to attract more bookbuyers to the sites so that our sellers will sell more books. Many booksellers are often surprised to learn how much happens behind the scenes. I'll go over some backend and front-end marketing activities from the past year:
Editor's Note: Mr. Blum proceeded to share in great detail Abe.com's marketing efforts. We edited for space.
Online Marketing (our marketing efforts "behind the scenes")
We have a powerful affiliate network of over 8,000 members.
We work hard to stay powerfully positioned with the key search engines.
We are aggressively pursuing third party relationships to create new strategies that will increase Abebooks' ranking in "natural" searches and are constantly evaluating new ways to bring Abebooks to the "top of the pile" so interested book buyers come to our site first.
We have optimized our site (Search Engine Optimization).
Offline Marketing (our marketing that takes place out in the world)
Includes Print Advertising (including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Utne Reader, The Phoenix, NY Review of Books, Poets and Writers, Book Magazine, Geist, C&RL News and European publications); Public Relations; and participation in most major fairs and festivals in North America and Europe.
Bookologist: Abe's reputation has been very good and it was very nice to see that your company was voted as one of the top 100 Canadian companies to work for. Where can you improve from there (customer and employee satisfaction)? The article said you had 80 or so employees. Any plans to increase the size of the company or decrease it?
Blum: I'm glad you like the experience of being a bookseller on ABE because this is exactly what the whole team of 90 employees works hard to deliver every day. Our teams in the two offices in Victoria and Duesseldorf, are a great bunch of highly talented and motivated people and we are definitely planning to grow this team accordingly to our business. To give you a sense of the tone here at Abebooks, we've been described as a mix of "techies, webheads, and bibliophiles."
Where can we improve? There are several areas where we try to improve continuously. Our booksellers offer unique products and the majority of our buyers love the experience of buying from booksellers who also offer personal service. Our ongoing main focus is to make this offer available to the bookbuyers worldwide and ensure an experience that encourages them to recommend ABE to their friends. This goal has a lot of facets including fast, intelligent search and book updates, smart investment of our marketing budgets and superior customer service for buyers and sellers.
Bookologist: How many books and sellers are listed with Abe at present?
Blum: We've got approximately 12,100 booksellers listing 55 million books.
Bookologist: What do you foresee as the future for online sales? (Example: taxing Internet sales) Will larger sites assume a greater percent of the market over single, small-time sellers?
Blum: We see a great future. Based on our research we expect the relevant market to grow between 15-17% on average each year between 2000 and 2006. And our goals are more ambitious.
As for one issue in particular - the upcoming closure of Half.com - we are seeing a lot of booksellers moving over to Abebooks right now, because of this. Abebooks is a good answer for booksellers who are worried about this loss of a good marketplace.
Bookologist: One suggestion, not a question really, is that Abe's order management page (for individual orders) requires accepting a sale before releasing customer information (shipping info). This is a bit different than the way Alibris and Amazon do things and Abe's way is less attractive. If a book is, for some reason, unavailable, it means going back to refund the order rather than rejecting it outright. A seller can, of course check his/her database, but this requires additional work. Any plans to change the selling page at this time?
Blum: In terms of order processing, yes, we are investigating several improvements to our order processing system. However, it likely won't work in exactly the same fashion as other online book retailers, as one of the benefits of Abebooks is that booksellers can choose to process their own payments. (Whereas other retailers process payments on behalf of the bookseller, and include the cost of this service in their discounts and fees.)
Changes on the table for Abebooks order processing include creating a more simple process to indicate if a item is available, added functionality to download a report on recent orders, and providing easier access to buyer information for printing shipping labels. There are other improvements planned as well, that we'll be announcing over the next few months.
Bookologist: Have you had to weed out many sellers for not complying with the new quota system for BNBQ and Amazon?
Blum: We have been utilizing a fairly strict fulfillment requirement program since the inception of each program (we were ahead of other online book retailers in insisting on high performance from our participating booksellers). Because of the familiarity of our booksellers with the fulfillment program, we rarely have to remove booksellers when we run our fulfillment program each month.
Bookologist: Are there any new partnerships on the horizon?
Blum: It is still our main focus to grow our own sites. To achieve this, we currently have several projects in the pipeline that keep us busy. But at the same time, we are continuously looking for new partnership opportunities.
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