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Features
Online Retailing Technology >> Surviving the Amazon Jungle
10/29/2004
While many campus bookstores struggle to stay afloat, innovations in campus ‘etailing’ are helping others reclaim dollars from the big online sellers.
Whether they’re perusing the aisles of local mass merchants or clicking
through mammoth eCommerce sites, few activities are as enthralling for college-age
kids than shopping for CDs, books, sporting goods, you-name-it. But for Pacific
Lutheran University (WA) students with cash in their pockets or credit lines
supplied by parents, LuteWorld is now the place to spend. That’s because
LuteWorld (www.luteworld.plu.edu)—the
university’s etailing hub that was launched in the summer of 2001 as a
simple extension of the campus bookstore—is now billed as the school’s
“Campus Transaction Center.” Visitors to the site can buy anything
from books to concert tickets to school sweatshirts. Parents can purchase birthday
cakes for their kids, baked and delivered by staff at the nearest dining hall.
Alumni can make donations to specific scholarship funds or buy seats for dinner
at Homecoming. Students can even add money to the debit strip on their ID cards,
giving themselves cash for things like laundry, vending, snacks and meals, printing,
and bookstore purchases.
“There’s really nothing our students and affiliates can’t accomplish on our site,” says Mark Mulder, director of auxiliary services at the 3,400-student institution. “We knew the bookstore was one way for someone to connect with the school and purchase a product, so we sat down and asked ourselves, ‘Why not provide other ways, too?’”
That question seems to be on other minds these days, as schools expand etailing efforts. Once a back-burner offering to ensure students wouldn’t go elsewhere to buy their books and school supplies, eCommerce sites are slowly but surely becoming destinations in and of themselves; transaction centers where everyone—students, faculty, staff, alumni, even the general public—can connect with a school and spend.
And while a handful of schools are building and managing etailing efforts themselves, a far greater number are turning to vendors such as Sequoia Retail Systems (www.sequoiars.com) and Nebraska Book Company (www.nebook.com), which specialize in Point of Sale (POS) and etailing services targeted at off-the-shelf solutions looking to rebrand the functionality. Most of these solutions are delivered on a managed services basis, meaning that the school d'esn’t purchase the software, but instead uses Managed Service Provider (MSP) vendors who “host” the applications. These vendors handle everything from management to maintenance, and charge schools a monthly subscription fee, eliminating the need for institutions to worry about expensive implementations of any kind. In short, there are now dozens of ways for colleges and universities to blow out their etailing strategies. Lauren Freedman, president of the E-tailing Group (
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