Creating an online bookstore

I visited Pak Chong of GerakBudaya on July 12, just to catch up and follow up on what we might be able to collaborate on for book publishing. I had a couple of ideas to show him.

Earlier, via phone call, we had briefly spoken about the state of the book publishing and book retailing industry. Like the broader retail sector, book sales are not good either. All publishers and all bookstores are suffering, it seems.

I asked him about e-commerce and how that's coming along and whether he had done some digital marketing. He said he didn't have the right people to do this. This made me think about how I might be able to help.

My thinking all along was what could I do to assist and how could I be compensated for it without incurring too much burden on them? When I was at their bookstore and I saw so many Malaysian-centric books all around me a thought flashed across my mind. How about taking a radically different approach to helping them boost sales by opening up an online store of my own and applying my skills at content marketing to promote sales through my own store?

I suggested the idea to Pak Chong and he was agreeable. He introduced me to his colleague, Augustine, who spoke to me about distribution arrangements they had with other online retailers and we quickly came to an agreement that would work for both of us.

My margins would not be quite as high as physical bookstores but they would help to handle the fulfillment so fair enough.

Augustine suggested a very basic way of doing it which is to set up a social media page and have people pay by depositing money into my bank account. That's a very blogshop approach. I wanted something more professional.

I decided to contact Adrian Oh of webShaper whom I had recently interviewed about e-commerce and asked if his e-commerce platform would be suitable for creating an online bookstore. He said it could. I then made an appointment to see him about that.

So my basic idea is this:
a) Set up an online bookstore that sells Malaysian-centric books. The platform will be by webShaper.
b) I will source these books from GerakBudaya, which is the leading distributor of Malaysian-centric books
c) I will promote these books through my own blog set up to highlight the books that I sell. Sometimes it might be just a description of a book, other times it could be a review and occasionally I might even interview the author (that's where my journalism skills come in handy).
d) It will be a gradual roll-out. I won't launch the store with thousands or even hundreds or even tens of books in the catalogue. I will introduce books in phases and promote them via a blog.
e) Promotion will also be done through social media and hopefully some of these things will go viral.

Will this work? We shall see.