Retail madness or is that wholesale madness? 20th October 2010.

I’ve been having some serious fun since Friday and despite the fact that MPB (Male Pattern Baldness – Ed) doesn’t run in my family, I’m not far off a bald scalp. Mind you mine is bleeding and sore too.

All down to the, shall we say, peculiar, behaviour of our new wholesaler and a couple of retailers.
As you know from earlier posts, I spent several weeks of intense effort recreating book formats to new standards, resizing covers and renaming everything to its ISBN numbers before spending even longer sourcing and formatting the metadata necessary to upload our catalogue to the wholesaler’s web site.

I was ecstatic when the upload worked 100% the first time, and blew my own trumpet here. That’s unfortunately, when the current problem started.

This wholesaler also suppliers four of the retailers we currently supply direct, and two we currently supply via another wholesaler. Not a problem, according to their blurb and instructions, not a problem at all. There is a system in place which allows us, the publisher, to block our content from reaching individual retailers. Perfect from our point of view.
Guess what, without even updating their own web site information, or their user guide they discontinued this system, it is now up to the retailer to decide if they want to take particular content or not.

As a result of this approach by the wholesaler, I have spend oodles of time checking the retail sites to see if books were on there twice, and guess what – I found two retailers affected. One I e-mailed and they immediately responded by removing the wholesale delivered copies from their site. Thank you. However, I did get a slightly miffed e-mail from the boss there – why was the wholesaler offering 91 titles and we’d only uploaded 50 odd to her. (Luckily I had a reason – their site doesn’t have a relevant category for 38 of our books (as it happens all of them my own).

The other retailer is more of a problem – they managed to match titles and ISBN’s on most of the books, leaving something like 5 duplicates but their response was “we don’t block content from any contributor” which I felt was rather unhelpful.

The basic problem revolves around the insistence of the wholesaler splitting title into sub-title which we don’t and nor does the retailer – as a result the titles don’t match. We load our ISBN’s with the dashes in middle of the numbers, the wholesaler doesn’t.

How this is going to work in terms of the two sites we have no direct relationship with, I have no idea.

I have a feeling this one is going to run and run....

Anyone know a good balm for a tortured scalp....!