I like books. I don’t necessarily love to read, but I like to use books as references. They provide a reliable source of useful and credible information, much more so than the Internet.
I buy books online regularly and enjoy browsing at a physical bookstore. Lately, I’ve been buying most of my books from Amazon, but before Amazon established itself in Australia, my main go-to online bookstore was Booktopia.
Booktopia went into voluntary administration in 2024
I stopped buying from Booktopia about 5-6 years ago. As much as I wanted to support local businesses, something about the way they engaged with me as a customer repelled me.
So, what caused a shift in terms of my brand loyalty?
This is based on my own personal experience.
Convenience
Booktopia never seemed to have any book titles I was looking for, and I’d have to wait for the book to be shipped from overseas. I didn’t really understand how every book seemed to be out of stock despite Booktopia showing off its new fancy warehouses.
Books are not big, so I’m not sure what they were stocking in those warehouses that they would regularly run out of stock.
Amazon, on the other hand, seemed to have everything I wanted in stock and ready to arrive the next day. Since I’m a Prime member, shipping is also free.
Shipping from Booktopia was also an issue for me. If I bought a single book for $30, I’d have to fork out another $10 to have it shipped and still have to wait a couple of days for it to arrive.
Did I mention Amazon delivered my books the next day for free? I did? Okay, let’s move on.
Booktopia did have regular ‘free shipping’ promotions, but what prevented me from buying from them was the price.
Price
Every time I got a promotional newsletter from Booktopia on price sales and discounts, I’d visit the site only to leave minutes later when I found their prices were generally higher than Amazon on the titles I was looking for. And when I do find a cheaper title, I’d still have to pay for shipping, which leads to the total price being higher than Amazon or a local bookstore.
They occasionally offer free shipping promotions, but the books are at full price, negating the savings obtained from free shipping.
I stopped looking at Booktopia newsletters after a few failed attempts to get a good deal. I simply didn’t trust them anymore.
What did we learn?
If you’re planning on doing a promotion, research your competition. Make sure you offer real benefits to your customers. Your sale price should be lower than your competition’s. But if you’re unable to match your competitors’ prices, then don’t compete with them head-on like Booktopia did with Amazon because you’ll lose.
Don’t go broad, trying to capture every customer demographic to gain ‘more market share’ because the bigger players will eat you for lunch.
What to do?
You could use analytics and user intent to find out what customers are searching for on your site. Then, you could make sure you have that product available, slap on a small discount, and promote it like there is no tomorrow.
Stay in your lane and satisfy the customers who are loyal to you; you’d want them to keep coming back and telling their friends.
Because guess what? If you piss them off, they’ll tell their friends too.