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!
As always, this has been a project with a long gestation.
The first challenge was to get a good catalogue of the books. Thank heavens the previous proprietor had the energy to scan all the volumes they had. But we set up a new system for the point of sale (using Vend, a New Zealand-developed system), and had to transfer them over.
And of course we discovered that not all the books in the catalogue were actually still in store. (We still have 3,542 books that we bought with the store that are in principle on the shelves but in practice are sure to not all be with us). And we need to keep entering in all the books we get in each month and keeping track of sales as well. Such a job.
The second challenge was to find someone to develop the website and to design it so that it didn't create a whole lot more work in the store. We do not have images of our books, so alas we could not use an off-the-shelf system and had to build our own online catalogue.
The clever people at Turboweb in Dunedin made it so the online store accesses our catalogue in Vend directly. This means that the list online is always up-to-date for sales in store, and when when someone buys something online, the sale comes through in Vend just like one in store but with the shipping information included. So handy!
Stumble upon
One of the delights of coming into the store of course is browsing the shelves and finding some unexpected gem. That book that you didn’t know you needed in your life until you saw it and then it couldn’t possibly be left behind. To that end, the search function has a delightful quirk that we discovered in the testing phase. For example, if you search for “Jane Eyre” it will find the copy that we have instore. But it will also politely assume that perhaps you might have made a spelling mistake, and it will also show you some books that have “eye” in the title. So there is always the opportunity to come across the unexpected.
So when you can’t make it in to see us in person, the online store lets you search all the books we have in store and purchase them directly from the website . They will then get sent out to you in the usual beautiful brown paper package, or you can pick them up in store for free.
In nearly five years we have come a long way from a enormous salmon pink front desk (the horror!), an ex-plant store wasteland out the back, and shelves stacked so close together it was difficult to squeeze past them and find what you wanted.
Thanks for continuing to support us and sharing the space that the bookstore provides to discover new stories, to slow down and to step out of this world for a while.