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For the first five years or so, we penned a blog post every few months on aspects of the store’s plans, operations and performance. Take a look below. In reverse chronological order, but I am sure you are a flexible person.
It's still true! The more recently a book has been processed, the faster it sells.
Having Paywave really does increase the number of people using credit cards and reduce the number of people using EFTPOS.
We have owned The Open Book for nearly five years now. Each year we make improvements to the store to respond to what customers want. Our most recent innovation is drumroll our online store!
One of the joys of owning a secondhand bookstore is that we can provide a stage for literary culture. To make that joy real, Anna, our dedicated events curator, has been organising events since August 2017 as part of a series called Ears Wide Open.
We have sometimes wondered whether they reduce sales or increase them
It has long long been part of the plan to sell coffee in the marvellous bookstore. We haven't quite got there yet, but we did hit a milestone this summer, with the first delicious cup of espresso rolling off the press.
The bookstore was closed to instore customers from March 26 until May 14. It has now been a month since we reopened. It is interesting to see what we have seen so far.
With the bookstore closed for lockdown, it is a good time to look for happier stories. What could be better than a fond appraisal of Christmas, that joyful time for retailers?
A year ago I wrote a rather long post about the unexpected fact that books that have recently arrived in store sell much better than books that have been around a while.
Turns out it is still true.
We bought the bookstore three years ago in August. Maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel, if you squint at the numbers in a certain way.
Things have been changing a bit around the bookstore, as we mark our third birthday. A retrospective is in order, in four parts.
Donations are the lifeblood of this literary micro-business. We take anything dropped off at the store and we occasionally do pickups for people who live nearby. We filter for the books that are in good enough condition to sell, which we then process and put on the shelves.
We did a survey in August, September and October to find out more about who visits our store.
We have been looking recently at the question of what types of books sell best. We have no shortage of hypotheses. But the number of potential variables make it hard to do the analysis, let alone find any general guide.
Now we think we might have found one useful rule.
In June we made 322 sales for a total revenue (including GST to make the numbers relatable) of $8,522. This means the average sale was $26.50, a bit above our usual of around 23 dollars. (Basically people usually buy about two books and they cost about 12 bucks each.)
The bookstore generates a lot of data. Amongst other things, we know sales numbers, revenue, what kinds of books we sold, and how much each customer spent, as well as social media interaction, traffic to the website and the number of subscribers to our excellent podcast, Ears Wide Open.
Something wonderful happened this past weekend, and it wasn’t just that our quarterly clearance sale was our best day ever.
December is the best month of the year for revenue at the Open Book. December 2017 was our best month ever and we made $11,000 (!), about 60 per cent more than October or November. Breakeven at the moment (with me donating two days a week to the store) is around $7,500.
In September we made 274 sales. In November it was 268, practically the same. But revenue was over $1,000 more in November than September. The difference was in average spend per customer, which we call basket value.
