Author: Murray

Simple Shelving Tips to Increase Bookstore Income

Posted on by Murray

Yesterday I was asked about how to manage sections in a store. A new bookseller was starting to organize her store, after hitting the point of feeling like there were too many books to be manageable. They were looking for resources on how to select what sections to have, where titles would go, and generally improve the organization and browsability of their store. Of course, that kicked my brain into high gear since it hits the perfect combination of bookselling and library science.

Reference Books for Booksellers

Since we’re all bookworms, I often start this discussion out by pointing to two books I’ve found invaluable. You may look at the publication date on these books and be skeptical. I was too at first. However, as with most fields with centuries of history, there are many timeless pieces of advice and these books fit that bill. Not everything in them will be 100% applicable to bookselling in the 21st Century, but I feel confident that you will get at least some tidbits if not some revelations.

The first title I’ll point you to is A Manual On Bookselling edited by Robert D. Hale and published by the American Booksellers Association. This consists of many topical essays from real booksellers. Each essay gets a dedicated chapter, organized thematically. There are great resources in here about a wide range of bookselling skills, including merchandising and organization.

For a book specifically about organizing the store, including shelving sections, merchandising, and layout, Bookstore Planning and Design by Ken White is full of good information. It’s illustrated as well, with some useful figures showing sample floor plans and such. It is really helpful when pondering how to set up your shelving and arrange your sections.

Web References for Booksellers

When it comes to shelving decisions about titles, I recommend looking at Edelweiss 360 and just using their categories. Why? Because if you use them for ordering (and you should consider it), you can import the orders into many Point of Sale systems directly as a purchase order! That way you’re creating a PO and adding section mappings for your frontlist and other new items to your records at the same time.

Another great resource for shelving choices is pulling from libraries. Worldcat is a “confederated search” of libraries. What this means is that you can look up a title and see multiple library holdings at once, giving you an idea of how the book is treated my multiple libraries and can help you make decisions if you are on the fence about a title.

Practice, and data, make perfect when locating sections.

The Finances of Shelving

Someone new to bookstore ownership may come in with an attitude that works in many settings, but is less useful in books: income per square foot. Although this is one point of data that can be useful, I usually recommend that people weight income per linear foot. What I mean by that is calculate how much each section is earning based on the total length of shelving. Here’s a n example:

If a bank is four feet wide and has 8 shelves, it’s 32 linear feet.

That bank averages $1,000 per week. Divided by 32 that is $31.25/ft

4′ x 8 shelves = 32 linear feet

$1000/32 = $31.25 per linear foot

So, why use this calculation rather than square footage? Well, one big reason is because shelving units have different numbers of shelves. Two units with a 4′ x 1.5′ footprint take 6 sq. feet each, but if one has four shelves and the other 8, it’s a very different use of space for merchandising, and tracking and optimizing income per linear foot on those shorter banks is incredibly helpful as a point of comparison with the taller ones.

Section Optimization in Practice

Here is an example taken directly from my work experience. I kept track of graphic novel sales at a prior job. When I arrived, they were hard to browse, in an odd spot on the floor, and taking up way more space than their sales numbers and even quantity required. I took them to a different location that made more sense based on readership, and used a bank better suited to their display. I stuck them next to adult sci-fi/fantasy and across the aisle from YA Scifi-fantasy. The bank was narrower, so they didn’t look sparse, and included a nice set of display shelves for face-outs. At the same time, I weeded the section and worked with our buyer to bring in some fresher frontlist and more reliable backlist. Sales grew a lot over the two years I was there.

But, it doesn’t stop with graphic novels. Because of changing their location, we were able to feature our music and art books more effectively, finding locations that increased those sales as well. With periodic evaluation of income per linear foot, we kept tweaking and found a great balance. Since I’ve left, I have seen that the effort paid off, as sci-fi/fantasy and graphic novels have grown. And that was all just by analyzing how much income they were earning as a ratio to their section size, and optimizing through some simple changes.

By analyzing how much income they were earning as a ratio to their shelf space, and optimizing through some simple changes, sales in sci-fi/fantasy and graphic novels grew.

Tips and Tricks for Display

Something that’s almost never obvious to new booksellers, and takes a lifetime of practice, is optimizing the number of books per linear foot. Although there’s a certain charm to the jam-packed used bookstore with books crammed together and spilling off the shelves, it’s not necessarily the best for sales. Too many titles crammed into a shelf make it hard to peruse titles, and gives up the opportunities for impulse buys that face-outs engender. Conversely, too many face-outs on a regular shelf make it look sparse and like you’re low on stock. It’s a psychological thing for customers, and takes practice to manage.

There are, however, contexts in which lots of face outs and crammed together books can work. Take, for example, table displays. It’s common to see new release or remainder tables, with large stacks of books laying face up for quick browsing and grabbing. These are eye-catching, give your customers something they look forward to on Tuesdays, and are a great source of sales. Of course, they have their pitfalls, too.

With stacks, the trick is to have an optimum number in the stack. Again, there’s psychology here. I can’t count the number of times I had a customer say something like, “Oh, I can’t take the last copy!”, or seen the smaller stacks start to get lost. To handle the former, I’ll usually make a joke such as, “It was clearly waiting for you to buy it!”. The latter is best handled by having a few book stands to feature those singletons, and if the sales have slowed and you’re not expecting another big delivery of copies, just move them to their section when they’re down to one or two.

“Oh, I can’t possibly take the last copy!”

A customer, probably

Head over to our reference page for our growing list of learning resources and remember, you can send us questions, comments or hot tips right here!

E-Commerce in the Pandemic – Part 2

Posted on by Murray

In E-Commerce in the Pandemic – Part 1 I talked about shifting your perspective to help your mental health and improve efficiency. As promised, here is part 2 about logistical changes that can help improve efficiency, and by extension, your mental health! There are a lot of common questions and pitfalls that I hope to give you some pointers to overcome.

Sourcing

Sourcing books is a big consideration right now. If you’re in a region where you can be open and have staff, you have more flexibility. If you end up closed, on the other hand, you may be working from home using a drop-shipping service like Ingram‘s Direct to Home program or using a Bookshop.org page for an affiliate commission. Whatever the case, streamlining this process is important.

The biggest thing you can do to improve this portion of the workflow is create a way to cross reference orders against your store stock. If your POS can import your web orders directly, it may have a way to run a pick-list. If you use a service like IndieCommerce, your website will be able to generate it for you assuming you’ve synced your inventory. Either way, if you have a list of books that customers have ordered, which includes the order information and stock, you can very quickly fill large portions of your orders. If you’ve designed your site to optimize shopping for in-stock items, it goes even farther.

Take that list, use a paper cutter to slice it into individual titles, and you and your staff take 5-10 slips at once (or more if you have book carts) and walk the floor pulling titles. Have another staff member ready with order invoices to collate and pack the orders as the books are picked. If you can control the format of your picklist, make the slips large – like 1/5th sheet of office paper, with a prominent order number. Having an easy time seeing what order a given book is on will greatly speed up the collation and packing that happens later.

Once you have the list off in stock items, you’ll have its opposite as well – the items that are on order, but not on your shelf. Again, your POS may have a great way to generate a PO for the appropriate vendors, and get those books in ASAP. Then again, you may need to be breaking these out by hand to decide whether to send it to the publisher or a jobber. This is where the slowdown can come in. Having an experienced buyer on staff (or being one yourself) will work wonders, since you’ll already have a workflow for placing orders. However, if you’re new to buying or haven’t had to think much about where the orders go, here are a few tips.

If you do most of your business through a jobber like Ingram, and that’s working for you, now isn’t the time to figure out a whole different workflow to start trying to incorporate publisher orders into your workflow. A trick I learned from a store I work with was to use Ingram’s quick order feature to paste in the full list of ISBN’s for the items you don’t have. There is a portion of iPage where you can put in ISBNs, one per line, and click “Check Stock”. It will build an order that you can place directly on iPage with only a few clicks. The upside is you’ve saved a ton of time. The downside is you potentially miss out on a few points of markup by not going to the publisher.

If you have a robust backlist program and do regular orders from publishers, try and start filling special orders that way as well. PRH has been almost as fast as Ingram for several years now, and if you’re doing backlist orders with them, there’s no real reason to give up the significantly better margin you get by ordering from the publisher just to shave off a bit of time.

Shipping

Shipping these days is so much easier than it once was, but no less lacking in decisions and options than anything else. First, you absolutely need to find a service. I use PirateShip, Mike uses Stamps.com, still other folks use ShipStation or one of the other many shipping sites. The main considerations or being able to create labels in bulk and efficiently, and choosing a service that supports the carriers you use.

I love PirateShip because I use Cubic Rate Priority Mail a lot. I’m a rabid supporter of the USPS, so I don’t need something like ShipStation since I don’t ship via UPS or FedEx. PirateShip has great rates for USPS and is super easy just to upload a spreadsheet to. They also support saved packages and the ability to copy/paste an entire address and intelligently parse it into the correct format.

Mike raves about Stamps.com because he makes extensive use of their hardware. He uses an integrated scale, and in combination with the ability to import the shipping addresses he can weigh the books, spit out a media mail label, and have the books processed and packed lickity split.

Perhaps the biggest challenge with shipping, though, is managing costs. Customers have, thanks to certain retailers I shall not mention, become accustom to artificially low shipping fees. We all know we can’t compete with that realistically, and our customers are getting used to that fact, but it’s still hard not to lose money on shipping. Often, you’ll be selling using a platform that has fixed or only minimally customizable shipping rates. This means that you have to figure out how to average your shipping costs across your orders, rather than obsess about getting a certain margin on each individual order.

How do I do that, you may be asking. Well, track your shipping costs over the course of a few days, weeks, months, and try to come up with the average cost to fill an order via a given method. Use that data to find prices that average out to zero or a bit better. Let’s say that you offer Media Mail shipping for $4.50 and Priority for $7.50. You’ll frequently be spending less than $4.50 for Media Mail, which will offset the times you’ll spend more than $7.50 to ship Priority.

This calculation is where good flat-rate shipping methods can be a lifesaver. The Priority Rate Cubic I mentioned above is a good example. It is based on size, not weight, much like the USPS Flat Rate options, and is almost always cheaper. It’s often not all that much more than Media Mail, and the service is more reliable and comes with insurance. Read up on it, see if it’s right for you. If not, there’s something out there that is.

Supplies

Having the right supplies for shipping is important as well. There are a lot of sources for packaging and labeling, and everyone has their preferences and requirements. The biggest recommendation I have is self-adhesive labels*. Printing out 50 labels at once and not having to tape each one on individually will save you literal hours of your week.

For packaging, consider the free supplies from USPS. They will deliver them in cartons to your door if you request it, giving you a ready supply of packaging for anything you ship with them. Other folks I know will buy padded envelopes in bulk off eBay*.

I hope this post gave you some ideas! Please send us a note with any questions, comments, or hot tips you’d like to share.

E-commerce in the Pandemic – Part 1

Posted on by Murray

There is no arguing massive shift from in-person to online sales over the last year has saved many bookstores. There’s also no debate that it has been a pain point for many, if not most stores. Some adapted smoothly, others have faced rocky waters. There’s one quote that really stuck with me:

It’s the same amount of sales for 10 times the work per employee

– Bay Area Bookseller, quoted in localnewsmatters.org

The sad truth for a lot of stores is that they are spending more time on fewer sales, but for many stores it is just the opposite. Why the difference? Largely it’s a combination of optimizing workflow and adjusting perceptions. This post takes a look at the latter. Part 2 of this post will look at some possible optimizations.

Adjusting Perceptions

I’ll start by saying that I have no idea whether the bookseller quoted above had tracked the difference in time in detail, but that even if they haven’t it’s irrelevant. Whether or not the time was actually ten times higher, the perception is that it was. We all know what it’s like to have to do something we don’t want to. How it can end up feeling like time is dragging, and everything took so. Much. Longer.

Whether or not it actually takes ten times more work, the perception is that it does.

Very few of us got into bookselling to pack boxes and drop them in the mail. Most booksellers, at least in my experience, get much of their energy from helping people directly. It’s that moment where a couple returns from their honeymoon and thanks you for the hot tip you gave them about their destination when they bought a guidebook. It’s befriending the neighborhood eccentric and learning all their interesting stories, or the kid who’s been coming in for years looking for their next favorite book. For some, it’s even the monthly phone call asking you to measure the bookshelves.

The challenge, then, is not letting the lack of handselling make us disheartened and want to quit. How do we do that? Everyone is going to have a slightly different answer, but I’ll share some tips and tricks from long hours doing repetitive packing and shipping tasks and some that I’ve seen other folks doing.

1. Engage your brain

Packing boxes, taping them up, and slapping on a label seems, on it’s face, impossible to find anything but monotonous and boring. But, it doesn’t have to be. The thousands of hours I’ve spent over the years packing, moving, stacking, unstacking, and unpacking boxes have led me to find some interesting brain puzzles to keep myself distracted.

When working in wineries, the wine coming off the bottling line gets stacked into a particular pattern on a pallet to ensure it is stable. I spent a great many hours figuring out the optimal order in which to stack those boxes to minimize the strain on my back. I also spent many hours pondering why not stacking one layer at a time was not such a good idea as I opened and examined every case of wine on a pallet after discovering the bottles had been underfilled. Two puzzles in one!

Working in a college bookstore, I set myself the challenge of organizing the boxes I wheeled out of the truck and up the elevator 4-5 at a time to minimize how much walking and moving we’d need to do to put them in their sections. It was a game of memory, Jenga, and a sliding puzzle spread over four years. I don’t know whether I ever “won” the game, but I sure do miss those 2-4 weeks leading up to the start of a new term.

When processing orders online, the challenge became optimizing the website to maintain order in the chaos of ever increasing volumes. What parts of the process could be more automated? Did every order require a personal note, or was there a way to split them up and handle some in bulk? Why was it we could tell who processed an order by the kind of mistake that happened?

2. Be silly!

You can tell I like thought experiments and puzzles. Those aren’t for everyone. A store I shop with frequently has done something interesting. They’ve started collecting “quotes from the warehouse”, which get printed on the back of their complementary bookmarks. It’s been really fun receiving a package with some new, bizarre quote every month, presumably taken entirely out of context. I imagine the booksellers, masked up and across the room from each other, having random conversations. I fill in the context myself, and I hope that they’re having as much fun in real life as they do in my imagination.

3. Take breaks!

Make it a point not to let your whole existence become pick and pack monotony. A friend of mine started hosting Facebook Live events so she could handsell from her store to get a break from loading boxes and driving around town. Even while driving, she’d turn on the GPS and, at the end of the night, post the crazy route around the city she’d taken, complete with anecdotes about hollering a socially-distanced “hello” to a regular customer or cleverly composed selfies with friends designed to hide how far apart they were.

From an ergonomic standpoint, breaks are important too. Being in pain makes everything harder, and staring at screens too long can cause vision problems. Remember to look off in the distance for about 60-90 seconds every 60-90 minutes. Gazing longingly at your favorite neighborhood coffee shop not only lets you ponder how wonderful things will be in the not-so-distant future, but also relieves the eye strain that close-up work can cause.

Do something similar with stretches for your hands, arms, back, legs, neck. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke, so while you’re imagining that perfect pour over, take a moment, too, to shake out your hands, shoulders, neck, and legs. Maybe make a face at your coworker to distract them from getting too bored. Anything to remind your body that it is more than a box-packing machine.

4. Remember, this isn’t “normal”

Anyone telling you that “this is the new normal” is wrong. This is the temporary normal. The short-term discomfort. If pandemics could re-wire all of humanity’s collective psyche to stop getting together in groups and going about daily life surrounded by other people, we would have become solitary beings a few thousand years ago at least. Things may not look the same as they did 5 years ago, but we certainly won’t be stuck 6 feet or more apart from our coworkers with doors locked to the public forever, either.

Every time you feel overwhelmed by a huge list of orders to pack, remember that getting through those keeps the store afloat and gets you one day closer to selling in person again. Each box sent out the door represents another customer who didn’t stop shopping with you despite all the challenges of life. Think how silly the new parent getting “Moo, Baa, La La La” will sound reading it to their kiddo, or ponder what book you’ll suggest to the person to whom you’ve been shipping nothing but Patricia Cornwell titles for the last 9 months once you can fully re-open.

5. Read Part 2 of this post

Next up I’ll cover some ideas for ways to optimize your workflow. I’ll run down the common pain points I’ve seen many stores hit, and give some frameworks for you to use when dealing with them yourself.

If you have any tips or tricks for surviving the monotony and keeping from feeling overwhelmed, drop them in the comments or send us a note!