Last week Which?, a Consumer Reports type organization in the United Kingdom, released the results of a survey focusing on customer satisfaction as it relates to online shopping for entertainment products.
Abebooks UK lead the field with a rating of “89% for overall satisfaction and were praised for how easy it was to find products on their site.” The sample size for AbeBooks was pretty slight at 89 respondents where Amazon UK had 2812 and, the other company that shared the top spot with AbeBooks, Play.com had 416 respondents. Categories included Price, Availability, Delivery and Returns.
I would love to see someone undertake a similar survey of the vendors that make up the core of the offerings for the major book aggregators like Alibris, Amazon, AbeBooks, Biblio and even the websites of the professional organizations like the ABAA and the ABA.
For the most part, the publicity and focus of the book aggregators is on the end user with very little attention paid to the vendors who supply the inventory that make these sites run.
How happy are the vendors?
How satisfied are they with the way things are going?
This dream survey would be broken down by type of bookseller so that one can see who is really being better served by the current mix of online third-party bookselling.
Categories could include:
Booksellers that are members of a professional organization.
People that sell books only online.
Megalisters – vendors that have available for sale more books than they own.
It would also be interesting to survey independent bookstores that sell new books to see how satisfied they are with the current state of the publishing industry. All have been side-swiped by the new pricing models that exploded on the scene with the rise of Amazon and Costco, are they satisfied with how the publishing industry responded to their needs?
There is a collective power among independent bookstores and booksellers that has yet to be effectively harnessed and unleashed. For now, many of us are taking what we can get from these various venues waiting for the day when we find our ultimate online home.
Which? article on the results