Content is the king, price is the emperor (and delivering is the goddess)
Last week I have ordered books for at least the tenth time in a year. I prefer polirom.ro. And librariilehumanitas.ro, but not that often. I cannot stand dol.ro, after some experiences. I will not analyze amazon.com, although I have ordered on their site too this year.
Let’s take them one at a time:
1. polirom.ro
- Best value proposition: 30% discount (I prefer buying 6 books instead of 4, especially since I am a power-buyer).
- Ugly, not user-friendly site. Without too many facilities.
- Big variety: all their books.
- I do not like that it takes 10 days for an order to arrive at me.
- Free delivering starting from 50 lei, I think.
- Value proposition quite ok: I see now that they offer 10% discount; they used to have 20% (already 10% is not a sufficient incentive for the medium buyer - 50/150 lei).
- Clean website. Clear. Although the search does not always work (it has some small usability problems).
- Great variety: I have even found books that appeared out of stock at Polirom.
- Medium mail delivery period: around 5 days.
- Free transport.
3. dol.ro
I do not know much retail, but I think that Diverta cannot compete with a serious book store chain on the depth side (for example Carturesti or Noi). They just do not have enough books on the shelves. Because in the otherwise generous space they have to stick other things too. An exception I think it’s the bookstore form Vital Mall. But, for instance, the one form Diverta is pathetic.
Whatever, you might think they will improve their virtual part. But it’s not like this. Try searching, for instance, “Borges” on the three websites and see what you get on dol.ro. It is phenomenal how many books on their site can be out of stock. Especially when the advantage in e-commerce is the long-tail and the 24/24 availableness.
- Until this summer it was weird that they did not offer discounts. Now they give a 20% - that’s good. It is already a sure value point.
- The delivering problem (at least when I ordered). Because I work two steps away from Unirea, I chose to take my order directly from the store. When I got there I had to wait a lot. Plus the price would have been 3 lei higher had I bought from the exact same store. So where is the advantage? (Now I think the discount solves this problem.) Had I chosen mail or special delivery I would have had to pay the transportation, no matter the value of the order.
What we can see:
1. Finally, the big offline players (publishing houses, distribution firms or retailers) have more chances to impose themselves. And that is due to the brand and the power of acquisition.
2. Neither Polirom, nor Humanitas promote their site how they should do it. And thank God, there would be ways! For instance, on the bookmark from Polirom it says “The Cultural Supplement” and “Liternet.ro”, but it does not say something like “order from polirom.ro and you have a 30% discount”.
3. Nobody knows how to make the delivering in the same day - I have never got a message in the same day saying that the books I have ordered have been sent (it takes minimum 48-72 hours).
4. There are no incentives for community generated content - see, for instance, threadless.com. If they would offer a little discount or some points for the reviews, I think they would generate some content that could increase the value of their business.
5. There are no intelligent recommendation ways, other than the previous orders. This is the key for orientation in these domains: collaborative filter, clustering etc.