Help the customer tell me how to ship his book

Archive: Online bookselling

I mentioned a time back that we decided to leave Antiqbook. When I emailed the guys they kindly gave us two free months. I wish I could say the books ordered since then proved Antiqbook more profitable for us.

I suspect that European dealers and antiquarian booksellers can benefit more than a shop like mine that has lots of routine cheap books cataloged (that cataloging them has been a mistake is a topic for another time).

Without intent to disparage the nice guys at Antiqbook we found them sometimes the most frustrating site to sell through. The site unsurprisingly brought a fair number of orders from folks in Northern Europe. Rarely did the buyer specify shipping. And rarely did they respond to our request for clarification. Eventually we stopped asking and shipped books via surface mail unless instructed otherwise. (Oddly dealers ordering through them were the mostly likely to ask for a discount.)

Having a field or checkbox for specifying shipping should be a given in mature website design. Plenty of folks are inexperienced online shoppers and even more may be making their first purchase from a foreign seller. And even if you know what you are doing how often have you forgotten something because the phone range, you wanted more coffee or another quotidian distraction?

Let us not forget that some people are just lazy. It doesn't matter if they are sloppy, distracted or just learning: I want their money; they want my book. It is the responsibility of anyone who wants me to pay them for listing my inventory to make the buying and selling as painless and thought free as possible.