Easier with BookNet: Which books are your customers not buying?

At BookNet Canada we develop technology, standards, and education to serve the Canadian book industry. Our services help companies promote and sell books, streamline workflows, and adapt to a rapidly changing market. 

Whether you’re new to bookselling or a veteran, the information shared below will show you how BookNet can help you save time and resources, allowing you to focus on what matters most: selling books.

Which books are your customers not buying? Find out with the help of @BookNet_Canada's products and services.
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One of the challenges booksellers faced during the pandemic was inventory management. In BookNet Canada’s The State of Independent Bookselling in Canada 2020, survey respondents shared that they would continue to leverage some of the changes they made to survive pandemic store closures including increasing more efficient frontlist buying, buying strategically, limiting discounting, and ordering outside of their core genre.

Below we’ll share tools, tips, and tricks that will make managing inventory easier, more cost-effective, and more efficient.

With the help of BNC SalesData, BookNet’s national sales tracking service for the Canadian English-language trade book market (which is free of charge to retailers), and a store’s point-of-sale (POS) or inventory management system, it’s possible to gain a very detailed understanding of what’s happening with your bookstore’s inventory.

The following are some suggestions as to where to first focus while evaluating your store’s inventory.

Turnover rate

When considering improving the efficiency of a bookstore’s inventory, a good measure is the “stock turn” — this number tells you how many times the store’s inventory has been flipped in a given time period. Are the books selling or have they been sitting on the shelves for too long? Most industries have a benchmark to measure against and the book retail space is no different. An annual turnover rate of between 2.5 and 5 is a healthy range to aim for.

To calculate stock turn using SalesData, use the Bestseller report. Using the multi-week, peer view criteria, the stock turn formula is:

(Total Units sold for the period selected / Total Units on hand for the period selected) x 52

You can also look at something similar at the title level. Knowing the percent sell through of specific titles provides a window into dead stock or stock that is flying out the door. This can be a great tool to help improve the performance of a category or an individual title. This sell through percent can also be found using the SalesData Bestseller report. When using the single-week criteria for a specific retailer, the percent sell through formula is:

Units sold in the given period / (On Hand in the given period + Units Sold in the given period)

You’ll want to use these numbers to find out:

• What gets sold quickly after stocking?

• What’s continuously being restocked and how frequently (by month, season, year)?

• What’s the turnover rate for different types of books (“midlist” titles, first-time authors, other segments)? 

Returns, return rate, and unsold stock 

Continuing with the evaluation of a bookstore’s inventory, the return rate can offer valuable insights. The return rate percentage formula takes the net value (dollar) of books returned in the specific time frame divided by the net value (dollar) of books received in that same time frame.

In The State of Independent Bookselling in Canada 2020, the average return rate of respondents was 17%, with half of the respondents having a return rate of 15% or higher. More specifically in terms of revenue, the average return rate is lower for small bookstores (those with a revenue under $450K) at 14% and higher for medium (16%) and large bookstores (22%).

Moving on to unsold stock, the SalesData Inventory Performance report, which can be generated from the Gap Analysis Report’s criteria page, allows retailers to compare their home store to a group of stores and see which titles are stocked but did not sell in the home market but that are selling in the comparison market. This report also shows the stock turn rate.

Here you’ll want to identify the following:

• Are sales, returns, and restocks correlated to or caused by how books are categorized or displayed, or by other marketing and promotion efforts?

• How is this similar to store returns to publishers? What can you change in your ordering process (quantities, etc.) to limit inefficiencies?

Giving your books a chance to getting noticed

We talked about the books you’re not selling and how to identify them. Now, let’s talk about giving readers the best chance at discovering books. In surveying Canadian book buyers for our upcoming Canadian Book Consumer Study 2022, we found that browsing and searching for books online or in person was the second most popular way that book buyers became aware of the books they bought in 2022. This confirms that good metadata — Thema, ONIX, BISAC subject codes, keywords, descriptions, etc. — is crucial for discovery and not just for selling online. In fact, an easy way to access this type of information is using BNC CataList (also free to retailers). When logged in to CataList you will be able to see any information the publisher has provided about their marketing plans, key selling points, reviews, as well as excerpts and other publisher-produced collateral materials.

If you want to dive deeper into the metadata and standards topic, the BookNet Canada blog has a wide range of resources available for your perusal. You can also find out more about our work on book standards here.  

Even three years into the pandemic, it remains critical to ensure all aspects of your website and ecommerce are up to date and as optimized as possible, from browsing to the checkout experience. According to new data from our Canadian Book Consumer survey, 58% of book buyers shopped online in 2022. If you’re looking for tips on how to provide a seamless ecommerce experience for your customers, this webinar hosted by the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association (CIBA), where they talk about recreating the in-person browsing experience online and share actionable tips on how to facilitate the discoverability of in-stock titles, is a great starting point.

Another way to improve the chances of your books getting discovered is through social media. In The State of Independent Bookselling in Canada 2020, we found that almost all of the booksellers we surveyed used Facebook for promotion or customer engagement (98%), closely followed by Instagram (91%), with Twitter in a distant third (63%). Being active on social media can not only help with the promotion of your store and products but also offer you insights into trends that can potentially impact your sales and buying decisions. Take #BookTok, for example, where frontlist and backlist books have gone viral, taking unassuming titles to the top of the most well-known bestseller lists. Learn more about the impact of social media, including BookTok, on book sales in recent instalments of our blog.

Looking for more actionable tips to leverage the power of BookNet’s products and services? Start by reading other instalments of our Easier with BookNet blog series here, and don’t hesitate to get in touch with your specific questions. We’re here to help you succeed!