How They Do It - #2
Further to my recent post on the IDPF survey of eBook sales, I have started an 18-part series where I take a look at the 18 e-publishers individually (one every week) to get an idea of how they market their digital products.
I’ll be looking at these websites from a purely buyers perspective with my e-publisher’s eye scanning for little bits we can and can not do to improve our publishing businesses.
In part 2 of this series I take a look at ellibs.
ellibs is a leading European e-book service provider offeging a variety of services related to e-book publishing. In this article, we’re looking at the ellbis eBookstore.
The store is impressive in its simplicity and minimalist design. The have more than 11,000 e-book titles for sale.
The basic layout and design does a nice job of making the purchase process run as smoothly as possible.
There’s a link to their e-book catalog and yep, all 11,000 titles are listed in this document.
I must say I was disappointed with what appeared on each e-book page. Yes, it does a basic job of offering up the usual information: ISBN, Title, Author, Publisher, Year, Language, Price and Buy Now button.
That’s it. Just the basics. There’s no feeling there, no community or reviews - nothing to get me passionate about buying.
What surprised me - and I am very happy with this - is when going forward with the shopping cart. It runs on a basic PayPal backend. It caught me off guard because based on their main site and the perception of a large store I was assuming to see a more robust e-commerce system. I am happy to be wrong.
The advanced search is clean and offers ways to search deeper. I like the choices.
What I didn’t like fairly quickly browsing through the bookstore was that every link opened up in a new page or tab. That caught my (negative) attention straight away.
What I learnt…
- A simple design can be just as good - if not better, than over-stuffing your page. It focuses the prospects attention on what exactly is on offer.
- Once again, an ISBN gives that added credibility.
- Make navigating the site as easy as possible - Do Not open up links in a new window - it annoys visitors.
- PayPal is a very robust e-commerce system and offers a decent shopping cart - but we all know that :)
- Engage with your visitors - don’t just lay out the facts. Offer up some community, some reviews.
Hope you got some good insight into ebook marketing from part two of this series. I must say I’m also learning more as well from this exercise - much more than I expected.
By looking at other publishers websites with a buyer’s perspective it totally focsues your attention on what works and what doesn’t.
Next week I’ll take a look at Ellora’s Cave Publishers in my 18-part series.
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