|
At the 2006 Independent Amazon
Booksellers' Convention in Seattle, I had a vendor's booth to
demonstrate my "Bookkeeping for Booksellers" software and to promote my
book. Kevin O'Brien of
SpaceWare had the
booth next to mine and we struck up several conversations.
At the time, I was
making changes to my online bookselling business and had dropped my
listings from Abebooks because sales through their marketplace had
dwindled to almost nothing. This meant that the lookup feature of their
Homebase inventory management software was no longer available to me.
That, on top of the fact that Homebase had no automated re-pricing
features, meant I was going to be spending a lot of time entering new
inventory and re-pricing my inventory to keep my prices competitive.
Together, this was
sufficient motivation to investigate other inventory management options,
so meeting Kevin and learning more about
SpaceWare's AMan Pro
software came at a great time.
I spent some time at the
convention talking with other vendors that provided inventory management
services so that when the convention ended I would have an up to date
perspective of the features and options associated with each.
When the convention
ended, I pursued my investigation of the various inventory management
software solutions, but always came back to
AMan Pro. The
only drawback I could find was that I was still listing my books for
sale on Alibris and the
AMan Pro software
was only compatible with Amazon's Marketplace. I continued to
investigate and struggle through the listing/re-pricing challenges for a
few more weeks and then decided that with recent changes to the Alibris
marketplace and dwindling Alibris sales, Alibris was not very attractive
to me anymore either. At this point, I dropped my Alibris marketplace
account and subscribed to
AMan Pro.
It has been about six
months now that I have been an
AMan Pro
subscriber and selling exclusively through
Amazon.com, and I have no
regrets. AMan Pro
has met every challenge I have thrown at it, Kevin is very
responsive to customer
inquiries, and I have found the re-pricing feature alone is worth more
than the AMan Pro
subscription fee. It used to take me several hours to re-price a couple
hundred books, but with
AMan Pro I can
re-price several thousand in an hour, and it only takes that long
because I go through the suggested new prices very thoroughly. If an
online bookseller sets up their re-pricing criteria in
AMan Pro
properly, it only takes a few minutes to completely re-price an
inventory of several thousand books. AMan
Pro even has a feature that allows a bookseller to schedule their
re-pricing activities automatically. If you really want to, you can
schedule AMan Pro
to re-price your entire inventory every few minutes, but I would
personally recommend only doing it at intervals of a week or a month.
Since the bookseller
convention, I have not only subscribed to
AMan Pro, I have
partnered with
SpaceWare and promote them on my website. I have also come to
appreciate why Kevin and
SpaceWare are so
well respected in the industry.
Another feature that I
have recently taken advantage of is the integration of Dazzle (Endicia's
online postage service) with
AMan Pro. Now I
just start Microsoft Outlook which automatically loads
AMan Pro, and
everything about my Amazon sales are imported into
AMan Pro. After
I have checked my sales, verified the weights of the books, and
generated customer packing lists/invoices, I press a button and all of
my postage labels are generated with stealth postage so my customers
never see what I paid to ship their book.
This may not seem like a big deal, but prior to subscribing to Endicia,
I had to print out two customer packing slips so that I could cut the
address information from one to tape on the shipping envelope. Then I
had to stand in line at the post office for up to 30 minutes a day to
have postage put on each book individually. The stealth postage I use
now allows me to just drop the books off at an unattended clerk position
without having to wait in line at all, and international customers that
pay me almost $10 to ship their books do not see that it only cost me $5
to ship. This also applies to those very lightweight books that I can
send First Class for $0.87 that a customer paid
Amazon.com $3.49 to have mailed.
AMan Pro makes
the previously time consuming and frustrating tasks of online
bookselling easy and virtually transparent to me, and with Amazon being
the elephant of online marketplaces, I do not find myself missing the
other marketplaces at all. I strongly encourage all of my customers to
sell through Amazon and to use
AMan Pro as their
inventory management software and re-pricing tool. Once they have a
business volume that warrants it, I encourage them to add Endicia's
Dazzle program so that
AMan Pro can
generate their shipping labels too. It all makes for a cost effective
and efficient business operation, allowing booksellers to spend their
time productively looking for more good inventory instead of processing
the books they have already sold or re-pricing the ones they already
bought.
I am not a
SpaceWare
affiliate and do not receive referral payments for customers I send to
SpaceWare, so my
recommendation is not motivated by any kind of financial reward for
recommending SpaceWare
products or services. In fact, I personally encourage you to
consider AMan Pro
when you are deciding on an inventory management software solution only
because I believe they have the best solution available for the
inventory management and re-pricing activities of online booksellers.
Furthermore, unlike
other services that have a monthly subscription fee
plus a commission based on your sales,
AMan Pro is
strictly based on a very reasonable monthly subscription fee that is
more than justified by the re-pricing features alone.
You are visitor:
To This Page
Thank You For Visiting
|