We are thrilled to have a new sponsor here at Bookshop Blog, Basil Software. A great built specially for your needs. I invited the owner of Basil to share with us a little about his business and his software. If you are considering opening a book store or upgrading your business then be sure to consider Basil.
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Basil bookstore software got its start back in the Spring of 2002. It’s a family run business and at the time my brother was dating a girl, now his wife, who was planning to open a bookstore with her mother. They had looked at the software products offered at the time and decided none of them really matched what they wanted to do in their store. I am a software developer and my brother is an IT expert so naturally she asked us if we could build a software product specifically for them. Basil was born. It has evolved over the last 7 years significantly from that humble beginning into the product we have now.
In the beginning we built the product at night and on weekends squeezing as much time into it as we could while trying to continue to have a life outside of our daily work and our nightly passion. We added customers slowly in the beginning because we weren’t able to put all of our efforts and energy into the product. But last May that changed. I was fortunate enough to begin to work with Basil full time and since then we have more than doubled the number of customers using our product.
Basil is built specifically for used and new book stores to deal with in-store credits and books of varying conditions and prices all with the same ISBN. We can keep track of your customers to help manage contact lists and to give and apply credit automatically. We can print barcodes for pre-ISBN books or any books for that matter. We can send purchase orders automatically to various distributors and publishers and handle any new product. We also can post your inventory online automatically to several markets including your own e-commerce site. We’ve found that online sales can be a critical addition for a bookstore. If you’re a used bookstore, you never know what book will come through the door and we provide information to let you know if that book will sell well online. Our customers have found this capability a welcome addition to our product and one that has helped them survive and thrive in the market.
We are a family owned business and we’ve been involved with the used and new bookstore business for quite a while now so we understand the needs of the market and the desire for success. We take advice and suggestions from our customers to improve Basil. I would say that the reason we are so effective in serving the markets we do is because we listen to our customers so well. That’s been a reason for our past success and we plan to continue that tradition to guarantee our future success.
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Eric McKnight
Addico Solutions, Inc.
Phone 770-236-8166
Fax (678) 807-2644
In college when we were selling all our used books back, I built a platform to share credits between stores, with a small % fee that the platform takes off the talk. It added inventory management and other features similar to Basil. The idea was to be able to leverage every other store’s inventory. The only issue was just waiting a couple days for delivery. But then half.com came out and I abandoned the project. This was way before 2002, though. Great to see that Basil has stuck around.
Yes i agree with Efusjon….selling used books was a big hit when we were in college….earning that extra pocket money certainly added to both our delights and extravagance ;)….the only difference now is that the web has taken over the overall concept and many online bookstores have grabbed the idea in their own unique way..i really like the simple strategy that A1Books.com adopts by guiding through mails throughout the selling process…rest i have never tried any other site…on a second thought, in fact, I have sold books to this online bookstore only twice… 🙂