(2021-09-12) With Sales Momentum, Bookshop.org Looks To Future In Its Fight With Amazon

With sales momentum, Bookshop.org looks to future in its fight with Amazon. With book sales booming during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year, the humble written word has suddenly drawn the limelight from VCs and founders. We’ve seen a whole cavalcade of new products and fundings, including algorithmic recommendation engine BingeBooks, book club startups like Literati and the aptly named BookClub, as well as streaming service Litnerd. There have also been exits and potential exits for Glose, LitCharts and Epic.

But the one company that has captured the imagination of a lot of readers has been Bookshop.org, which has become the go-to platform for independent local bookstores to build an online storefront and compete with Amazon’s juggernaut

The company, which debuted just as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading in January 2020, rapidly garnered headlines and profiles of its founder Andy Hunter, an industrious publisher with a deep love for the reading ecosystem

as customers are returning to retail including bookstores, Bookshop hasn’t seen a downturn

Bookshop now hosts 1,100 stores on its platform, and it has more than 30,000 affiliates who curate book recommendations. Those lists have become central to Bookshop’s offering. “You get all these recommendation lists from not just bookstores, but also literary magazines, literary organizations, book lovers, and librarians,” Hunter said.

Bookshop, which is a public-benefit corporation, earns money as all ecommerce businesses do, by moving inventory. But what differentiates it is that it’s fairly liberal in paying money to affiliates and to bookstores who join its Platform Seller program

“For me, the challenge now is to create a platform that is extremely compelling to customers, that does everything that booksellers want us to do, and to create the best online book buying and book selling experience,”

the company has been working hard with bookstores to optimize their recommendation lists for search engine discovery, SEO.

also layering in best practices around email marketing, customer communications, and optimizing conversion rates onto its platform.

With tens of thousands of affiliates, “it does feel like a buzzing hive of … institutions and retailers who make up the diverse ecosystem around books,” Hunter said. “They all have their own personalities [and we want to] let those personalities show through.”

Amazon, of course, is the biggest challenge for the company. Hunter noted that the company’s Kindle devices are extremely popular, and that gives the ecommerce giant an even stronger lock-in that it can’t attain with physical sales.

Because of DRM and publisher agreements, it’s really hard to sell an ebook and allow someone to read it on Kindle,” he said, likening the nexus to Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer on Windows. “There is going to have to be a court case.” It’s true that people love their Kindles, but even “if you love Amazon… then you have to acknowledge that it is not healthy.”

Ultimately, Hunter’s strategic concern isn’t directed to competitors or even the question of whether the book is dead (it’s not), but a more specific challenge: that today’s publishing ecosystem ensures that only the top handful of books succeed. Often dubbed “the midlist problem...”