A Return to Campus Store Shopping and Profit
with Industry-Leading E-Commerce

In times past, campus bookstores could count on student traffic and revenue since there really were no alternatives within reasonable reach. Students could only buy textbooks and most course materials at the campus store. The Internet has changed all that for many captive markets, as it has for this one. Dogged by new competition within easy reach of students—even from within the dorm—campus stores have been undergoing massive changes in recent years.

Rapidly increasing textbook prices are driving students online to find better deals, taking associated revenue to other retailers. Despite this online pressure, campus stores can count on some level of sustained business by students who choose not to risk the complications of purchasing the wrong textbook or course materials through another merchant. Indeed, the ability to return these to the campus store and obtain other textbooks if they change courses within a few days keeps some students coming back. Even so, the stark budget of most students presents strong motivation to find lower-cost alternatives.

The textbook industry is showing cracks due this and other pressures. The June 2013 Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of Cengage Learning, a textbook publishing company, may be evidence that the limits of traditional textbook pricing have been reached. Free learning materials through movements such as open educational resources (OER), the Open Course Library, and OpenStax College all compound the revenue evaporation from textbook markets.

Striving to replace the lost revenue, many bookstores have introduced new merchandise categories and engaged vendors to provide campus-branded online stores of their own.

Some products call for a level of support as well. Additionally, many categories will require a selection of options to satisfy the variety of needs and preferences.

Some vendors have attempted to ease the challenges by including other categories in their online store offerings to campuses. These additional lines typically consist of one or two brands for that category, providing an uninviting selection akin to corner markets attempting to cover all the basics.

Consider a likely shopping experience: A student has a Brother™ printer and needs to replace the toner cartridge, which is a commonly available TN-360 cartridge. Through a quick check of the bookstore Web site, the student will find it is not available since none of the major online college bookstore vendors stock this otherwise common consumable. The student then checks for a color HP 564 cartridge for his ink printer. He finds it, but only the full-price HP original cartridge is available. The vendors do not stock money-saving compatible or remanufactured cartridges, which cost less than half the price of the original HP while providing more profit for the store. The student ends up locating the needed products at other more familiar online retailers and the revenue therefore flows off campus.

Having had that experience, will the student be inclined to start at the bookstore the next time he needs some technology products? Most likely not since his first experience revealed a slim selection and full retail pricing.

So-called academic pricing, which provides students much-needed savings, can be a strong motivator for them to persevere through appallingly antiquated shopping methods. For example, some otherwise famous institutions of higher learning infamously require students to download an Adobe® Acrobat® document and fill it out to order computer products online. Some link directly to manufacturer Web sites such as

Major online retailers have invested heavily in refining the user experience in ways that increase sales and customer satisfaction. Large e-commerce sites constantly run tests of major and minor changes, seeking even the slightest improvements. Meanwhile, feedback mechanisms and surveys provide preferences for features, services, and customer service needs that bring ever-greater customer satisfaction.

As online retailers implement refinements, customers come to expect them in all the sites they visit. For example, in early e-commerce sites, additional product suggestions based on what a shopper was looking at or had just put in their cart were only seen on the largest sites. While the techniques to accomplish this were advanced and aimed at increasing order size through upsells, there were also concerns that it could annoy shoppers. However, when executed properly, customers actually appreciate it and do in fact spend more on the intelligently suggested supplemental products. Now the feature is expected and customers have been known to send feedback to site owners lamenting the lack of suggestions reminding them of items they may need to go along with their current purchase.

While advanced features such as product suggestions have come to be expected, surveys and the evidence from many online stores repeatedly highlight the priorities of price, fast