Posting, packaging and selling online

A fiery debate is raging in the rare book world, thanks to an article posted on the Fine Books Blog. The staff at Fine Books put out a fantastic magazine on the trade and I am an avid follower of their blog postings as they have a lot to share with dealers and collectors alike. However, this post has stirred up the boiling pot with dealers all over the world, and it seems that this issue has been simmering for some time now. Ian Kahn at Lux Mentis, posted a very legitimate response to the article on his own blog, which spoke out for many dealers who face the same problem. And the post was echoed again at Book Patrol.

So why the hullaballoo? Fine Books has pointed out something that has bothered me for a long time. It does seem somewhat counter-intuitive and possibly unprofessional when you try to buy something online only to discover that the price that you were quoted doesn’t include a bunch of extra costs, and that instead of your online purchase being a seamless and relatively straightforward process, you find yourself being contacted by people requesting further input and agreement from your own side. You don’t expect this sort of thing to happen when you buy a book from Amazon! So why is it so prevalent in the rare book trade.

There are a number of obvious responses to this and most of them have been covered very well by Ian in his post on Lux Mentis, and by others in their commentary on the Fine Books post. On the whole, it is difficult in practice to implement a price matrix that adequately covers the shipping charges on a book or collection of books in one go. To begin with, very few dealers have the time or resource to measure and weigh each book at the time that the book is catalogued. And costing in insurance and different shipping options complicates matters even further. But the final straw on the camel’s back is that the large majority of dealers do most of their selling through online aggregators such as ABE. Most of these aggregators don’t facilitate to adequately cover shipping costs, and for them to do so would require an agreed method of calculating this cost. Since the companies are aggregators, they cannot afford to make these decisions on behalf of all of the dealers that make use of them.

Is there a way out of this quagmire? Of course there are a number of options. The first and most obvious one is to set a standard shipping rate for all your books, but the downside to this is that on some of your more expensive or bulky items you’re going to have to bear the extra cost (and oftentimes this is quite significant). You could attempt to calculate a rough estimate shipping cost at the time of cataloguing and work off this for each item, but your still going to be eating extra cost for some orders. You’re also going to need your cataloguing software to cater for this, and many applications do not really facilitate this very well. On top of that, you would need all of your exports to include this field and for each portal that you upload to, to facilitate it. On top of this, you would need to go through your already catalogued items to update them to reflect this new shipping system. When you’ve got an inventory of around 5000 items or more, this is a pretty daunting task.

But the real question to ask is does this issue matter as much as we think it does? Rare book collecting is a very niche market and most people in the trade are aware of the way that things work and why they work like this. Frequently, although we have listings online, customers will still approach us directly before a sale is made, so that the online listing is really only used by many of our customers not for the buying, but more to track our stock. Sure, we do get a fair number of online sales, and often we get new customers online, who may not be familiar with all of the processes involved in the trade. But a few kind words in explanation are generally enough to appease most people.

From my position in the company, dealing with online processing etc, I would love to be able to work with shipping costs and insurance data to make the online sale process more seamless. But realistically, its unlikely to happen, and I don’t believe that we would suddenly get a mass of online orders if we resolved this. I guess, we’ve just decided to let sleeping dogs lie.