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Online Retailing Technology >> Surviving the Amazon Jungle
10/29/2004
At first, these solutions required bookstore employees to manually key in orders at the close of each business day. But by late 2002, these same vendors had developed etailing order systems that sync’d with customer POS systems on the fly, enabling bookstores to offer thousands of SKUs online and track movement of those SKUs in real time, just seconds after items were purchased. Nebraska was first to market with its all-inclusive CampusHub eCommerce solution, and Sequoia and Missouri followed suit soon after.
As these dynamic etailing ordering systems became available to higher ed bookstore retailers on a widespread scale, collegiate interest in the technology took off. Statistics from the big three POS vendors in the space indicate that more than 1,000 colleges and universities in the US and Canada signed up for etailing services between 2002 and 2003, and officials at the companies report that hundreds more have signed up since. Today, while most campus bookstore managers say their etailing sites comprise no more than 10 to 15 percent of overall sales, nearly all of the managers say they couldn’t imagine running the business without offering campus shoppers the option to buy online. What’s more, the numbers are growing: Bookstore managers have predicted that by 2005 (mere months away), more than 20 percent of sales will occur online.
Says Laura Nakoneczny for the National Association of College Stores (www.nacs.org),
“These days, etailing is simply a business necessity.”
Etailing Today
A recent study by IT analyst firm Jupiter Research (www.jupiter.com) indicates that between 2003 and 2007, college students will spend over $20 billion online. With such estimates, no wonder etailing efforts at many schools have become a priority. At PLU, for instance, Mulder says LuteWorld “rules” campus life, overseeing every transaction that comes across the campus transom. With the help of Sequoia, he recently launched a service that integrates the SCT Banner (www.sct.com) registrar’s database with the bookstore’s POS System (from Sequoia), enabling students to log on to the system, check their course schedules, and—right at that juncture—purchase all of the new or used books they need. The school charges $1 to $4 in service fees for every transaction, nominal to the students, but capable of generating additional thousands in revenue at a small school like PLU (additional hundreds of thousands across a state system).
Sequoia has implemented the same service at the University of Texas in Austin, where book sales are so voluminous that the bookstore has to rent trailers to help store inventory at the beginning of every quarter. A similar service also exists at Duke University (NC), where students can order all of their books online, then head down to the campus bookstore where employees have already picked and bagged the books, and are waiting to expedite checkout. Duke also offers a delivery service (campus store employees cart books directly to students’ dorm rooms). Brian Buttram, associate director of Duke Stores, says that while he d'esn’t expect this new service to replace walk-in traffic, he d'es anticipate that as many as 30 to 40 percent of all textbook orders could eventually be filled this way—coincidentally, a good solution for a campus with tight parking, like Duke.
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