El Corte Inglés: The uncertain future of the largest bookstore in Spain
In recent days everyone has received a mobile message encouraging them to buy literature on Todos Tus Libros, the commercial platform for independent bookstores in Spain (coordinated by the Cegal association).
"Better than Amazon", says the message and, although that phrase sounds like an advertising slogan, it expresses well what is the meaning of the
new sales channel
: to dispute from the physical stores the tendency to the digital monopoly of the American giant.
A week after the launch of Todos Tus Libros, Cegal has compiled its first data: between November 2 and 8, its channel billed 2,499 orders and closed another 999 reservations.
What is a reservation?
A purchase order in which the customer wants to pick up the book in the physical store: take a walk, say hello to the bookseller and look at the news.
In addition, the booksellers have sold 1,637 gift vouchers.
In total, the balance is 5,137 operations in one week.
"We are very happy with the debut. The experiences that the clients transmit to us are very good. Now we need to incorporate more bookstores that are in queue to access. There are up to 780 funds that are making availability and that can be added to the project", explains Álvaro Manso, bookseller and spokesperson for Cegal.
"Many bookstores are in queue because we require an effort to have their
stock in
order, to have efficient means of sale and delivery ..."
More data.
Before the commercial launch of All Your Books, 150 bookstores were displayed on the page.
Now there are 181. Similarly, the number of registered users was 29,000 people.
At the end of last week they were
38,454
.
About 30 operations for each bookstore, if we take the figure of 181 bookstores.
What life did Todos Tus Libros have before selling literature?
The web worked as for months as a great bookstore agenda in which a
potential as a social network of readers
was sensed
.
Users could create bookshelves with their readings, browse other users' readings, and communicate with them.
Something similar to what Goodreads does.
Now, the business tool is the center of the page.
The user searches for a title, either in the All Your Books search engine or in its window, and finds one of the 1.1 million available books (4.3 million titles listed that can be delivered within a maximum period of three days).
After the search, the
web
offers you a map with all the bookstores that have the title in your store (marked in red) and with those that can have it within two days.
The user then chooses in which library to carry out the operation and Todos Tus Libros completes the operation.
In addition, Todos Tus Libros allows each user to choose a preferred store, a local store that appears before any other in its offer.
The method also gives to record the best-selling books of the week.
There are not many surprises in this regard: Juan Gómez-Jurado, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Eva García Sáenz de Urturi, Megan Maxwell, Irene Vallejo and Ken Follett top the list.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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