How can some high street retailers be so clueless? 14th October 2010.

Sometimes, I find myself deep in despair. I just don’t understand the thinking behind the actions of some companies.

Take a very well-known high street book chain, well; very well-known in this country, at least, they have a bricks and mortar operation on the high street of most major towns and cities on these islands. I actually think my home town is the largest in the country that doesn’t have a branch.

Now, I’m not silly, or overly optimistic – I know they are not going to provide their “valuable” shelf space for the books produced by a small press publisher such as ourselves. It would be nice, and I’d be over the moon but it’s not going to happen other than on a purely local basis anytime soon, if that and if then.

That is not of course true of their virtual store – their on-line presence, their attempt to carry over their high street prestige into the on-line world and challenge the purely on-line retailers. Certainly a worthy goal, I’m all for healthy competition, but I have to say I’m extremely disappointed in their offering in terms of our books, and by the look of it, books from many other small publishers.

You can search for any of our print books (e-books are a separate matter and that is being addressed via another partner) on their web site and find them. Well, sort of, you can find the book is on there, but there’s no cover image (Image not available), no blurb and no excerpt. There is nothing more than a blank rectangle, the book title, the author name and the reduced price. Scroll down a little and you find the ISBN number, the publisher and the date of publication and the number of pages. Not even a category it fits in.

I ask you, would you as a consumer buy something that tells you so little about itself? I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t unless I was looking for the product by name, make and model, and I’d found all the information elsewhere.

Our books are printed by a subsidiary of the largest book wholesaler in the US. They are actually printed in the UK and the US and next year will be printed in Australia too. I’ve seen the catalogue entry for our books, it’s obviously something I check like a hawk, and the entry is complete and conforms to what they tell me is the worldwide standard.

So why in four hells can’t this particular retailer actually put the information on their site? I mean, they probably get hundreds of thousands of books from these people on a weekly or monthly basis?

I know there are differences between computer systems? Heck, I worked in IT for thirty years, and if they were dealing with little old us I could understand, if not condone the problem, but this is a biggie dealing with an even bigger biggie. One they need in order to sell more books.

They actually are in business to sell books.... right? ..... Right?