Introducing the BookTrakker Ecosystem for Book Inventory Management and Online Selling
BookTrakker is a comprehensive ecosystem that provides a wide array of tools focused on the needs of Booksellers of all types. Tools for Online Sellers are seamlessly integrated with the features needed for a Brick and Mortar operation, and thus Hybrid Sellers are well supported.
The primary benefit of using BookTrakker is that a Seller can focus more on the fun aspects of Bookselling, including the hunt and the research stages. While we have tools planned to aid in the hunt, our current tools provide powerful methods for researching pricing and eligibility of a book for sale – i.e. do you even want to bother with the book?
BookTrakker has been a fixture of the Online Book Selling Market since the late 1990s and is a mature, powerful ecosystem that will turbocharge sales for any type of Bookseller.
Data Entry Tools
All of this must be supported by powerful Data Entry tools that enable the Seller to build the Inventory required to upload listings to the various sites where books are sold – BookTrakker supports more than 30 listing sites. Our Data Entry tools include ISBN/ ASIN and Author/Title lookup which will populate the biblio data for a book, Text Modifiers that speed manual data entry by capitalizing, fixing known words like names starting with Mc or Mac, and many other useful features that assist the process of manually entering data.
With 4 custom price fields along with a dedicated eBay price field there is flexibility to support various pricing models such as a Dealer, Online, Store and so on pricing. Pricing can be set automatically during data entry, and then overridden as desired.
Speaking of fields, BookTrakker has over 40 fields describing a book, including 4 custom fields for use as the Seller determines. This can be a way to provide custom information associated with each book as needed.
Since different book genres or source or whatever can require different data entry patterns, there is a powerful Tab Order Manager available to customize the ‘path’ taken through the data fields so you only have to hit the fields that matter, either due to automatic data entry using the Lookup system or any other reason that a given field may not need to be in the Tab Order.
Uploading to Online Sites
One of the premier features of BookTrakker since inception is the One-Click Upload System that makes updating Online Sites as easy as pressing a single button. Well, that may be two buttons if you were entering books just before the upload – after all, to be honest, you will have to click the Online Button then Process and Upload to All Online Services. Of course, there could be one more button press if you wish to avail yourself of our system designed to help verify what will be uploaded. We highly recommend this, but it is not a requirement.
BookTrakker supports all the major sites along with a host of minor sites. Full integration with Amazon and eBay, along with FTP based upload support for sites like ABE, Biblio, Alibris, Chrislands and more. No matter how many sites are involved, uploads are a single button press away.
Images
BookTrakker supports robust Image Acquisition tools that work with Scanners, Cameras and Cell Phones. ABE Books commissioned a report that found that Images increase sales by roughly 15% overall, making images a critical part of the sales toolkit. This tool does require an additional monthly fee outlined in the fee schedule.
Acquiring images is as easy as slapping a book on a scanner and grabbing the image, or as complex as setting up a photo shoot center and using external tools prior to import. BookTrakker can crop, rotate, set contrast or brightness, and reduce the size of large images, while other tasks require an external app for now.
Muiltiple Images can be imported on a per-book basis without renaming the files as created by the source, or image files with names corresponding to our naming conventions can be imported in bulk for multiple SKUs at a time.
Once imported, BookTrakker manages the upload to our Hosting Server and a URL is inserted into the Upload files to provide the image to the services. This greatly reduces the time required to manage images.
Order Processing
Many Booksellers are concerned about multiple sales on different sites or missing sales due to an email not being seen. BookTrakker offers two tiers of Order Processing, and the Automated tier goes a long way toward reducing the anxiety associated with multiple orders for a single listing.
Order Processing can be run manually or automatically depending on which level is selected. This will download order data from the five supported sites (ABE, Amazon, Biblio, Chrislands and eBay), mark the books sold, upload the sold records and finally add them to a PickList that provides the Shelf Location where you store the book – assuming the Shelved field is loaded with the appropriate data.
Research and Repricing Tools
Sellers of all kinds have to decide whether to sell a book and then what to set the price at. This generally requires navigating to various websites and looking up the book to see what it is being sold at and how many copies are available, among other things.
BookTrakker ScanIt provides a robust toolset that aids in the process of rapidly researching books (additional monthly fee required). Best employed with a barcode scanner for ISBN books, it also supports Author/Title searches for books that do not have an ISBN. A Selector tool helps pick the proper book when multiple results are returned.
Once the book has been selected it can be displayed in a window where the book pricing details are on the left and a browser window on the right shows the book at the currently selected site. Supported sites include Amazon, ABE, eBay, ViaLibri, AddAll, BookFinder and more. A set of buttons provide a means of instantly switching between sites without having to submit the search criteria.
This is so powerful that we had an interesting experience during the development where we told a Beta Tester that she should stop using it while we fixed a critical bug, and she told us in no uncertain terms “Over my dead body”. And that was just during development! For anyone that does serious research, this tool is indispensable.
Robust Selling Tools Make Bookselling More Productive and Enjoyable
BookTrakker has hundreds of happy Sellers that have been using our tools for more than 20 years to maximize their productivity and make Bookselling even more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.
Please use our Contact Us form to inquire about how BookTrakker can take your Bookselling Business to the next level while increasing your satisfaction and enjoyment!