Back-to-school sales sustain holidays for Abebooks.com
The convergence of two active retailing periods, the holiday season and winter back-to-school time, kept online sales for Abebooks Inc. steady during the 2005 holiday season. “There’s a traditional drop-off in sales around December 15, but our sales kept steady after that period. We attribute this in part to increases in the sale of college textbooks, a market that for us developed about two years ago,” says a spokesman for Abebooks.com, No. 58 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites. The nearly 10-year-old e-retailer is a marketplace for new, used and rare books. “The holiday season now seamlessly merges with the college textbook season, and regular consumers are replaced by students,” he says.
Preliminary figures for the 2005 holiday season show an increase in the company’s gross revenue between 20% and 30%, compared with the same period in 2004. The conversion rate for the entire year increased by 21%.
“We marketed the holiday season very hard,” the spokesman says. “We had a special holiday books section. We encouraged our booksellers to do free shipping—and the ones that did had the highest conversion rates. Then textbook sales picked up where holiday sales left off.”
Every December, Abebooks.com typically sees a spike in revenue caused by consumers purchasing rare books, more expensive than new or used books, as holiday presents. This December, the film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe revived interest in the works of author C.S. Lewis, he says, which sold well on the e-retailer’s site.
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