Christian Books & More Database: https://www.bookstoremanager.com/cbm-export or access to a comparable Christian retail inventory database that can be digitally updated monthly with new book titles and gift products, new product images, and/or new prices.
Pubnet: Pubnet
*Pubnet: The North American book trade’s EDI community - 250 active publishers/suppliers, 1,600 active retailers, 16.7 million business transactions in 2017
Pubnet® organizes the order processes between publishers and book retailers with the standard global Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Orders are sent to Pubnet® by ERP systems on a completely automated basis and forwarded to the appropriate publishers. The key benefit of the system is its increase in efficiency: Book retailers connect to a single system and can access all of the relevant publishers, while publishers no longer need to maintain separate links with thousands of book retailers. This is particularly relevant for communications between major book retailers and smaller publishers, and smaller book retailers and publishers.
For retailers, the service is free of charge with the exception of a setup fee, while publishers pay a fixed annual fee based on their use during the previous year. Saving energy and time EDI messages supported on Pubnet® include: Orders; Order acknowledgments; Shipping notices; Invoices
Automating the sending and receiving of these documents can dramatically reduce the cost and time spent re-keying information, sending emails, dealing with faxes or sending information via the traditional post.
Our members include Internet bookstores, college stores, wholesalers, library jobbers, trade stores, international subsidiaries of publishers, exporters, elementary and high schools, book clubs and more. Pubnet® has been serving the book industry since July 1987.
I am incredibly interested in what you find out. Every time we bring up a new POS for our bookstore, we keep coming back to the ability to reliably and accurately track and report book sales. We have a lot of books our pastors have written that we sell in our bookstore and want those sales to be reported in a way that helps with marketing somehow (I’m not really sure of all the details).
As someone in IT, I just want to get away from the legacy concepts of “the server is a physical machine you plug scanners and label printers into” because it scares me that this is so physically vulnerable, not to mention using desktop hardware for some pretty critical components.
I know a few bookstores here have switched to online systems, such as LightSpeed, but I know a few online services we looked into had limits on the number of SKUs in the database (they were clearly not made for thousands of book options, and were more geared towards small cafe’s or pop-up shops).
I’ll ask our team what they looked at in the past, but please post back here as you find options to consider.
I did this before. I strongly suggest looking into Lightspeed Retail. I was able to cut variances from ~3-5% to less than .5%. They have a solid database and tools to import items in bulk from a CSV. It is a very user friendly system and incredibly powerful. You get a great bang for your buck.
I did some digging and was told that Bookstore Manager feeds into Parable which then reports to the Christian Bookseller’s Association for author rankings. I can’t find any current details on the CBA, which makes me wonder if they’ve gone under or if they’ve been replaced by the CRA.
Supposedly, BSMGR is the only source Parable accepts, but now that I’m reading more into it, it looks like they support a few other systems, IBID, IBID IE, and IRT.
I’ve reached out to Parable, but do any of you report book sales? We sell a lot of our pastors’ books, and it does help us to report those to as many destinations as possible.
Just to follow up, parable now supports about 14 different point of sale systems for reporting, including Lightspeed, Square, Shopify, etc.
We are downsizing our store and are likely to switch to Square retail if it supports enough SKU’s for us. Lightspeed would be my first choice if we were staying the same size and holding full inventory though.