Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2005 Issue
A Bookselling Sci-Fi Nightmare: The Computers Take Over the Marketplace
The Forbin Project (1970). A cautionary tale worth revisiting.
For booksellers selling good used books, this product solves one of our most pressing dilemmas. How do we quickly turn each listed book before the bottom drops out of it? Or, conversely, efficiently raise our prices if the book becomes scarce? And do we do that in each market in which we sell? (Assuming you are willing to sell your books for different prices in different markets.)
Ordinarily, you would have to go into each listing, whether new or whether you are editing an existing one, open up the browser, check the marketplace to see how much your book is now selling for, and then make an adjustment. With thousands of listings, this becomes a near-impossible task. Working in the background, Monsoon automates the entire process. It also integrates with shipping technologies like Endicia and, for larger businesses, with enterprise-level accounting software.
After a live demo with a polite sales representative, I do have some concerns about the product itself, in addition to its implications for our industry. The software looks as though it was designed for a very large bookseller (someone, say, the size of Powell's) who wants to send its listings to Amazon.com. Amazon gives booksellers the option of choosing specific conditions for their books: New; Very Good; Good; Acceptable. They do not have the rare bookseller descriptors Fine, Near Fine, Fair, or Poor. Given the number of rare books in our inventory, we found this inadequate.
Another concern is that Monsoon does not integrate with all the different bookselling sites, focusing primarily on the Amazons. It is unapologetic for this, as it sees Amazon as the gorilla in the bookselling jungle.
There is a data entry concern as well: While you can automatically upload your inventory from HomeBase, or other databases, the rules that govern the pricing for each book have to be individually decided upon, unless you want to set a more generalized rule. Messing with the listings of thousands of items we currently have for sale represents an uncompensated business loss.
Credit card processing was also problematic. As you know, Amazon and Alibris already process the financial transactions for each sale. The real benefit from having them do this is that we never have any problems or concerns with chargebacks. If a credit card happens to be stolen, as long as we can show that we have shipped a book, the transaction never comes back to bite us. Amazon does allow you to see cancelled transactions; Alibris does not.
We've found it to be pretty important to be aware of failed transactions -- those that are actually good, but where the buyer has perhaps inadvertently listed their working address as their billing address, and so fails the AVS check. Although it is somewhat awkward on Amazon to contact customers directly, we do so when the transaction has failed. Because we handle all of our own transactions on ABE for major credit cards, we are able to solve these problems and save the sale, instead of never knowing about it. Conversely we've done a very good job of avoiding potential problems.
