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Two selling sites announced changes early this month. The first announcement pertains to the inventory management system offered by Alibris. This is a program for listing books similar to Homebase (a program offered free by Abe.com). ABE also made some announcements.
Alibris Announcement
Alibris enhanced the Alibris Inventory Manager so that it is part of a comprehensive set of services and tools to help with everything including cataloging, editing, deleting, and re-pricing inventory. The new and improved functionality will be integrated into the Seller Hub and will be available to all sellers who currently use Alibris
Inventory Manager as of March 16, 2004. We will offer it to all Alibris sellers in the near future.
Below are a couple lists of new functionality and advantages; as in the past, Alibris Inventory Manager is a free service that Alibris offers all of our sellers - no new fees, no rate hikes.
Major new additions and advantages:
- Larger catalog for ISBN and pre-ISBN lookup: Alibris Inventory Manager still allows you to catalog based on ISBN lookup or title/author Lookup on pre-ISBN books; our catalog now contains over 5.5 million ISBNs And nearly 4 million pre-ISBN titles.
- Price comparison: a feature allowing you to price the book-in-hand relative to similar Alibris listings. This feature helps price rare, high-value books as well as more common books, and complements the Alibris Pricing Service.
- Downloadable records: Inventory Manager will be a non-exclusive tool: the items you catalog are yours from day one, to use as you please. You can download your listings in a number of formats, including tab delimited, UIEE and Homebase.
- Pricing Service integration: if you are enrolled in the Alibris Pricing Service you can easily maneuver between the Pricing Service and Alibris Inventory Manager, providing you the ability to check the market price as you catalog your items as well as reprice previously cataloged items.
- Fully integrated: regardless of how you upload your items, you can edit all of the items you have listed on Alibris using Alibris Inventory Manager.
Other additions:
- Settings and Preferences - many new fields including the ability to create Item ID's automatically or manually, ability choose a default language and a default currency.
- A "quantity" field so you and indicate if you have multiple copies of the same book.
- An additional condition code for "new" books.
- Additional media binding types including audio-book cassette.
- Bibliographic data is now fully editable.
- Instantaneous additions and changes to Alibris's inventory database.
- Ability to denote collectible books.
- A media type field - which now defaults to books, but will accommodate music and movie items in the future.
- More language options in the "language" pull down, including a secondary language.
Removed fields:
- LCCN field, Lot field, Facility Field.
- More notes field - instead you can add more notes in "private notes," "general notes" or in the book description.
Abe Announcement
The second announcement is from Abe.com and addresses a multitude of changes some that elicited a heated response during the March 12 roundtable discussion with Hannes Blum. I am sending them along so that our readers who have not yet begun to list with selling services can make a more informed choice. It is worth reading and you can find it here: http://forums.abebooks.com/n/mb/listsf.asp?webtag=abecomeng&ctx=1048576&cacheTag=x13-7&sts=3%2F14%2F2004+9%3A13%3A23+PM
Abe said future promised improvements include implementing a credit card billing field as an enhancement, stronger advertising, and implementation of a new catalogue structure based on BISAC, and improving the wants section by allowing buyers to enter more criteria. Abe expressed a continued hope that BNBQ shipping reimbursements will become fairer to Canadian sellers and that a price comparison guide can be made available to Abe subscribers.
One recent email sent to sellers warned that links redirecting buyers that are embedded in descriptions will be filtered out, eliminating the book from the inventory list. Quoting the email:
"Specifically, the filter will remove any listing that contains an email address or a web address in the book description or title fields. If you have any listings that contain this type of information please edit them so that we may continue to display all of your books on our sites."
Abe also added a new field in sellers' account information where they can enter unique shipping terms, such as "insurance included". They also brought the shipping rates up to the book details page, where they are more visible to buyers.
Abe's new commission structure begins on April 1, 2004 and implements a rise from 5% to 8%. As expected, this brought a flurry of anxious questions and concerns. Among them, seller-to-seller commissions being charged.
Blum outlined the price restructuring this way. Under the old pricing model:
if you list 4000 books, your subscription fees are US$37
let's assume you sell books for US$500 in one month and you process buyer credit cards, your commission fees are US$25
Overall fees are US$62
Under the new pricing model (same assumptions as above):
Subscription fees remain unchanged (US$37)
Commission fees are US$40
Overall fees are US$77
In addition, changes to the parameters of wildcard searches were made to increase the speed for search results. Wildcard searches may be used in the publisher field as long as they have more at least three numbers/letters before the asterisk.
"For example: wildcard searches of 1, 19, 19*, B, or Ra are invalid wildcard searches, as they did not have at least three letters/numbers before the asterisk. However, searches of 197, Rand, or Canterb will provide you with valid search results.
Further to that, the use of the asterisk is very time and hardware intensive, and has been removed for performance reasons. Widespread use of it could reduce the responsiveness of the search engine for all users."
Response comes with any change and Abe's roundtable was no exception. Many sellers are watching the industry with bated breath, hoping that a move to squeeze out the little guy is not afoot. Despite occasional threats to move business elsewhere, Abe is one of the giants that can draw buyers but even a company of their size can feel the alligators nipping at their knees so to speak. Despite their years of experience and foothold in the bookselling community, it is rife with competition. They, too, have to fight being squeezed out of their niche.
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