Selling books online: ISBN, editions, preorders and school orders

A buyer searches for a title. A warehouse ships an edition. Build the catalogue in two layers, with title and author above and one row per ISBN beneath, so the search page and the pick list both make sense.

The paperback and the hardback of one novel are different products, with separate weights, prices, shelf bays and stock counts. A new impression keeps its ISBN. A revised edition takes a fresh one, and that is where many shops merge records by mistake and lose count of the older copies still on the shelf.

Keep the old edition’s page live. Link it to the newer edition. Readers still search by the old cover, and a dead page sends them straight to a competitor who has the book in stock.

Most online bookshops list far more titles than they stock. That is normal. Trouble starts when every title says in stock, a customer orders on Friday and the book turns out to be at the distributor, a week away.

Give each ISBN a supply status. Show it on the page in plain words. Fill each status with a dispatch window taken from your own order history, so the promise comes from what happened last quarter and not from the distributor’s brochure.

When a title is off the shelf, say so before payment. Email the customer the moment the distributor confirms. If the supplier drops the title, cancel the line and refund it yourself, rather than waiting for a complaint to arrive in your inbox.

A preorder is a promise. Cap it at the quantity the publisher has confirmed in writing, and open a waiting list for anything beyond that figure, however popular the title looks on social media.

Allocate copies in the order the preorders arrived. Keep them in a separate bucket from shelf stock, so a walk-in sale of the first delivered copies cannot take a reserved one. Signed copies and special editions follow the same rule. Note the signing session on the line.

Publication dates slip. When one moves, email everybody in the queue on the same day with the new date and a cancel link, and leave the allocation order untouched. Charge at order or at dispatch? Say which on the product page.

Schools send booklists by class. Training firms send reading lists by course. Neither wants to add forty titles to a cart one at a time, retyping ISBNs from a printed sheet while the school secretary waits on the phone.

Turn the list into a quotation. Use one line per ISBN, with the quantity, the institution’s agreed price and a validity date, and show the supply status beside any title that is short. The school confirms with a purchase order number. It goes on every delivery note and invoice.

Deliver in parts when you must. A running tally of copies sent and copies still to ship on each line lets the school’s accounts clerk match your parcel against its order without a phone call. Pending lines wait for the missing titles. They ship later under the same order number.

Stock errors in a bookshop hide among lookalike editions. A returned copy shelved under the wrong binding. A damaged jacket that never left its carton. A count by ISBN, bay by bay, finds them.

Count the school-season titles first, a month before term opens. Compare the count with open quotations and preorders, then reorder from the distributor against the gap, before every other bookshop in town does the same. Sale or return stock needs its own line. Unsold copies go back to the publisher.

Start this week with your ten best sellers. Check each for one record per ISBN, a supply status and a shelf count that matches reality, then fix those ten before touching the rest of the catalogue.