Everybody's going to benefit. Co-op dollars are going to be less and less a factor. The easier you make it for the customer to take care of themselves, the cheaper it will be. It costs less to have a functional site that the customer wants, than a pretty site that the owner wants. Think of it as spending 40 an hour to keep your store open on the Internet.
Booksellers can learn from the big sites to keep it simple, self-evident and painless.
If it isn't, the customers are gone. As he warned, if a bookseller overloads a site with so many bells and whistles that it crashes the customer's computer, that customer will never return. Some customers shop our Web site and walk in our door, while others walk in our door and go to our iMac and log on to our Web site. In addition, the store remodeled four months ago and added three computer kiosks for customers, installed 17-inch monitors and side chairs in the special orders section so that customers can learn how to place their own orders and removed the walls between the backroom areas and the front. We felt we had to be on by last Christmas, and that's why we jumped to BookSite.