How building virtual book stores pays off for eCampus.com
For 6 years eCampus.com has done a good job building up web sales by going toe-to-toe on the web against the more than 3,000 colleges and universities with a captive student audience and established bricks-and-mortar book stores.
Now eCampus, which ranks as No. 135 in the Internet Retailer Top 400 Guide to Retail Web Sites, is finding a new and growing source of revenue: opening virtual book stores for smaller colleges and private high schools which can’t afford to operate a conventional store. The program also includes virtual universities who use eCampus as their main sales channel for text books.
Since the program began about two years ago, it has grown to include about 100 schools and other virtual universities, says eCampus CEO Matt Montgomery. “The program started when a school contacted us because they couldn’t afford to operate a bricks-and-mortar store,” Montgomery says. “We built them an online store.”
The list of schools which belong to eCampus’ Store Manager program are located in about 30 states and are made up mostly of colleges with less than 3,000 students. Private high schools and virtual universities are also a growing portion of Store Manager, Montgomery says.
To participate, eCampus builds each school its own affiliate store on eCampus.com. The individual online book stores contains specific information from each institution and lets students buy new and used textbooks by browsing online courses and seeing the textbooks and other materials acquired for each class. Each Store Manager virtual store is designed to meet the specific requirements of each school. Multiple links enable direct access to each school’s personal home page on the eCampus site. Shoppers can enter from the institution’s site or pages or by coming through the “Sponsored Schools” portal on the eCampus home page.
To encourage participation, eCampus pays participating schools in its Store Manager program a percentage of the transaction on both new orders and buybacks. All orders are picked, packed and shipped from the company’s distribution center in Lexington, KY.
ECampus, which carries multiple SKUs, says smaller schools with smaller enrollments and tighter resources like Store Manager because they can use eCampus’ purchasing power and relationships with national book publishers to offer deals on textbooks that can be up to 30% off full retail.
Since the program began, eCampus has expanded Store Manager to accept financial aid payments from individual institutions and made it easier for customers, primarily students, to return books and participate in a buyback program. “This program makes sense for smaller schools and institutions offering distant learning programs,” Montgomery says. "It’s turning out to be a new market segment for us.”
The push into new programs such as building virtual stores is helping eCampus grow its top line. For 2005, eCampus expects its web sales to rise by at least 30% to around $52 million, Montgomery says.
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