Lighthouse Technology Group's Book Seller's Tools is a feature rich online suite of applications aimed at helping companies buy and sell new and used books on the web. We strongly believe that the market for used books will continue to grow - especially in tough economic times - as consumers' willingness to buy a used book is enhanced by the cost savings of a used book over a new book.
The Used Book Market - How Big is it?
While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact volume of used books bought and sold in the market - research published several years ago indicated that several billion dollars worth of used books are bought and sold every year - and the growth in used book sales was outstripping that of new books.
How do I Make Money Buying and Selling Used Books?
Buying and selling books is a relatively simple business model -- find people who have used books who are willing to sell them, provide them with a price quote for the books you're willing to buy (not every used book has a potential buyer - our platform handles a majority of those cases to help ensure you only buy marketable books), make it easy for them to ship their books to you, pay them for their books once you have received and inspected them, upload a listing of your books to a service such as Amazon, price your books competitively, sell, ship and collect your money. Our platform facilitates that entire process - streamlining and simplifying the process.
How you make money in the book business is a simple matter of economics -- buy a book at a price that someone is willing to sell it for, mark the price of the book up to a price that someone is willing to pay for it - and keep the difference. Our book sellers tools provide a pricing engine that automatically determines an effective buy and sell price based on the market for each specific book and the current pricing in the market for that book.
Because book buying and selling is a relatively simple business - we believe it is a great business opportunity for those looking to supplement their existing income, stay-at-home parents who are looking to generate income but do so from home while the kids are off at school, or for some people - as a primary source of income. Tools such as Lighthouse Technology Group's book buying platform make it easy to get up and running quickly and effectively.
If you would like to see our product in action, we suggest that you sell a few books to one our our clients who are using our second generation platform - such as Sell Back Your Book.
About Our Book Seller Tools Product
Lighthouse Technology Group's book seller tools platform is a comprehensive suite of applications aimed at helping you - the book buyer. Our product provides the following base capabilities:
Price Quotes
Determining what you're willing to pay for a book is one of the strengths of our product. Through the use of pricing "factors" that are controlled by you - our pricing application determines the optimal buy price based on factors such as the market for that specific book, what that book is selling for in the market, the cost of shipping that book to you, and the margins that you wish to maintain for specific combination's of market demand and price. If there is insufficient demand, the price is too low (or high), or the margin is too small - you can inform the seller that you're not buying that specific book at this time.
- Book sellers simply enter the ISBN of the books they wish to sell to you
- Our application - using parameters set by you the book buyer - calculates the price that you're willing to pay for a book. You the book buyer - set parameters that "weed" out books that you're not willing to buy. Books that fall into this category are displayed with a message that states that you're not buying those books at this time
- Book sellers simply check the box next to the books they're willing to sell to you at the price that you're willing to pay
Order Creation
- Books that book sellers decide to sell to you are placed in a "shopping cart" - creating an online experience that is similar to placing an order on most online retail websites
- Our platform displays the total number of books in the sellers cart, as well as the total amount of the book order - as sellers submit books to your website
- Book sellers can view and update their shopping cart at any point during the process
- When the book seller has selected all of the books they wish to sell to you - they submit their "order" to you
- Each order has a unique order number for tracking purposes
- A PDF packing slip is generated with your store information and shipping instructions printed on the book seller's order form
- An email is automatically generated and sent to the book buyer, confirming their order. This email serves the purposes as a backup copy of the packing slip should they not have the ability to print their packing slip during the ordering process
- An optional email is sent to you - alerting you that you have an inbound order
Order Processing
Book sellers pack and ship their books to you, using either the label at the top of their packing slip or the USPS merchandise return label (should you chose to use prepaid shipping). Upon physical receipt of an order, our system provides the ability to:
- Pull up an order in the system based on the order number printed on the packing slip and the shipping label
- Receive each book, specifying the actual quality of the book and any notes that you wish to attach to that book (e.g., some highlights in book)
- Specify the put away location in your warehouse/storeroom for each book received - making it easy to pull and ship books when orders are placed for that book
- Generate an email receipt to the book seller, specifying that you have received their books
Automatic Posting of Received Items on Amazon
For those book buyers who sell their books on Amazon - our system:
- Our system sets the retail (sell) price of your books prior to uploading to Amazon. Pricing is based on the factors that you set - such as a minimum margin, or the lowest sell price on Amazon for that book, or the 2nd lowest sell price, etc.
- Book quality (e.g., new, like new, good) as well as comments you entered during the receiving process are automatically assigned to that item
- A product ID is automatically generated - helping to identify which copy of the book you have sold, and where that book is in your warehouse/storeroom
- Automatically uploads the received books to your Amazon account, making the books immediately available for sale
Outbound Order Processing
Out solution includes the ability to automatically download orders from Amazon and facilitates shipping books:
- Orders are automatically downloaded from Amazon on a predefined schedule (e.g., hourly)
- An order acknowledgment is automatically emailed to the buyer of your books when the order is downloaded successfully from Amazon
- You may check the outbound orders report during the day to track how many books you have sold that day
- When you are ready to pull the books that were ordered that day (typically our customers pull their orders the following morning), you can print a report that is sorted by warehouse/stockroom put away location - listing all the books that were sold that day - including shipping information
Repricing Engine
One of the phenomena that we witnessed first hand as owners of a book buying and selling business is that used book prices are in constant motion and where you land on the Amazon used book listings does play a large role in the velocity of your own book sales. Few book buyers click through more than one or two pages of listings before they make a purchasing decision. You may price your book at an attractive price today - that may result in your listing landing on the 10th page of listings in a week as other sellers have adjusted their prices to be lower than yours. This "leapfrogging" mentality by book sellers can result in your listings falling so far behind the other listings that you may never sell that book at your original asking price. To deal with that problem - we developed a repricing engine that looks at every item you have listed and its relative position to other listings on Amazon's used listings page. Based on factors that you set - our repricing engine will update the price to ensure that you are positioned so that buyers will see your listing and that the price is competitive with other sellers.
Our pricing engine also increases your selling prices! If the engine determines that the trend in sales price is increasing - we will automatically increase your price to match the trend.
In our own experience, this tool increased our daily sales by 20X the first day that we repriced our inventory to match the current market price for all of our inventory. While we in effect lost some margin due to repricing - the net effect was we moved books off the shelf that would have sat there potentially forever as they were not priced "in the market". We also found that by using the pricing engine that many of our books increased in price as lower priced competitors books sold leaving room for increasing the price will still maintaining a competitive position on Amazon's used book listings.
Customer Center
Our online customer center helps minimize phone calls and emails from clients who are inquiring on the status of their orders (book sellers). The customer center provides the ability for customers to:
- Manage their account information (e.g., name, address, payment preferences), email address
- Check on their order status (received or not received yet)
- Reprint packing slips
Technology
Our product is based on the following marketing leading open source technologies of PHP and MySQL. PHP is a programming language used on a vast majority of websites on the Internet today. MySQL is a highly scalable and reliable relational database.
Future Product Plans
There are a number of future enhancements on our product roadmap. Our clients' recommendations for new features and functions make up a large portion of where our product is heading. Our goal is to enable each of our clients to effectively buy books at a profitable price, minimizing the manual efforts associated with running a used book buying and selling business.
Our next release is a major release. We are in the process of deploying our solution on Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) - an open source web content management system (CMS) that will provide a rich set of tools for our clients to manage the content that they display on their website -- as well as adding a new capability for selling books directly from their website -- by passing the fees charged by Amazon. Our goal is to have this new platform out and ready for use in early Q4 2009. Watch for updates on our website (which is also on Drupal!).