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Secondhand retailer World of Books shot to success bulk buying unsold charity shop books and reselling them via online marketplaces. Its founders started the company in 2000 going to car boot sales and flogging books eBay – it is now the largest seller on the site by volume.
However, selling through its own site is key to its ambitious revenue goals. That move was prompted by Amazon’s decision to increase its cut by 30%. “By going direct we don’t have to pay the additional fees,” says Casey Zils, IT project manager.
Its “massive growth plans” are to increase sales from £8 million this year to £18-£20 million next year, followed by £46 million and then £83 million.
World of Books recently launched sites in the US, UK and Australia, with plans to open another in Europe this year and 3-4 the following year.
The firm partnered with cloud platform Commerce Tools to support its growth plans. “When we started with Commerce Tools, the vision was to go more direct. In May 2018 2% of revenue was from the website, now it’s 15%.”
Writing systems
In the UK, the firm processes a huge volume of products and has an ever-changing inventory of around 3-4 million items, with 350,000 coming in per day – although it only holds around 20% of that, the rest is recycled. Most of that is via the 2,000 charities it works with.
“Technology for us is the backbone [of operations],” says Zils. “We are a technology business and have a development team of 45-50.” It chose Commerce Tools because it could handle the scale of it’s the sheer volume of stock and the number of applications it uses to manage it, while giving the firm autonomy over development.
The firm has developed a lot of its systems in-house. For example, automation plays a large part in its processing. “Books come in, are scanned, and then from the algorithms we’ve built we’ll be able to tell if it’s something we want to keep. From the ISBN [the book’s unique identifier] we will be able to add the data and price… So we can actually sell them in about 19 minutes.”
It’s also developed a tool for charities, similar to its in-house system, where they can scan the barcode and get a quote from the firm’s sister company Ziffit.com (which pays people for their books, DVDs, CDs and games). “So the idea is we can offer charities the ease of giving them a price right there.”
Zils notes the firm does a lot of user-research in-house, which recently led it to change the prominence of its next-day delivery option to make it more distinct from the standard free Royal Mail service. That instantly led to a spike in people paying for next day, he says.
Next it plans to develop its own pricing system, as opposed to using quotes from Amazon. “It will allow us a bit more autonomy… and show things like user impressions on certain pages so can [gauge] the demand. “
For Zils, developing systems rather than going for off-the-shelf products is key to giving the business its flexibility. “We will continue to keep a lot in-house, [that way you] can own a lot of it, make changes yourself and follow the customer demand as that changes as well.”
He believes that will put the firm in a good position as it pursues its new growth strategy.
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