Your own bookselling website from just £24 a year with no commission charges

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Booksellers need their own personal online bookshop

If you're a UK bookseller, you need your own personal website even if you already list your books on a central website such as ABE

With your own personal website you can:

  • Send potential customers to look at your books and your books alone

  • Invite customers to see individual titles or selections of books

  • Increase your sales without paying any commission to anybody

  • Establish a direct one-to-one relationship with your customers

    • The UKBookWorld personal online bookshop service is Britain's most inexpensive and cost-effective way of doing this. It costs between just £24 and £72 a year, with no set-up fee, no commission fees on sales, and no hidden extras.


    How does having a personal website help me? Or save me money?

    Whether or not you already have your books listed on any of the large public database websites (ABE, Amazon or wherever), you need your own separate independent bookselling website with its own unique web address or personal domain name dedicated to your books and your books alone.

    You can then promote, publicise or advertise your books for sale in any way you want.  Without paying commission on your sales.   And without the likelihood of losing your customers to other booksellers.

    With your own website you can actively promote your books by inviting suitable potential customers to view individual items or specific selections from your stock without passively relying on buyers coming across your books on an internet search-engine somewhere mixed in with millions of other books.

    Equally importantly, you save by not having to pay any commission to ABE (or anybody else) on sales you generate yourself through your own activities.  If your own publicity currently sends customers to view your books on (say) ABE, you're losing around £8 in commission to ABE on every £100 they then spend with you.

    Furthermore, if you can process your own credit cards, you're freed from the expense of paying increasingly high fees to ABE to do it for you on sales you generate yourself.  That alone can mean another 2% saving on your sales. The UKBookWorld personal online bookshop service gives you this.  Our annual fees start at just £24 and we do not charge any commission on your sales.  100% of the sales through your UKBookWorld website comes to you.

    Your UKBookWorld website, which can be either accessed directly or linked into any existing personal website you already have, comes complete with a shopping basket for your customers including, if needed, a secure server for credit card details.


    This is what the UKBookWorld personal bookshop service gives you for £24 to £72 a year
  • Your own internet shop with its own unique web address, either a standalone address or which you can link to any personal domain name.

  • A webpage similar to the illustration at the top of this page (click here to see an actual example).  We design this for you based on the information you provide.

  • The ability to send customers direct to individual books or selections of books within your stock rather than just hoping they search and find your books for sale.  For example, you could invite customers in (say) an email to see all your books on Whitby by giving them a clickable link http://ukbooklink.com/wkm6fn (we'll show you how to do this).

  • A personal search engine dedicated to listing and displaying your books and your books alone.  You can add or remove books from your listings whenever you want, every day if necessary.

  • No links to other booksellers and their books.  Your visitors come to your website, your books; they aren't then invited by the system to look through everybody else's books as happens on ABE.

  • A built-in shopping basket with orders going direct to you.  The UKBookWorld service doesn't interfere in any way with the relationship between you and your customers.

  • For booksellers who are able to process credit cards themselves, a built-in secure server to handle your customers' card details (we don't process the cards on your behalf; we store the details on our SSL encrypted website for you to process in your normal manner).

  • If you don't process credit cards (or if you do but would also like to give your customers an alternative way of paying), we recommend you set yourself up with a PayPal account. With PayPal, you can start accepting credit card payments instantly. As the world's number one online payment service, PayPal is the fastest way to open your doors to over 40 million member accounts worldwide. To set up a PayPal account or learn more, click here

  • No practical limit to the number of books your bookshop can hold and display - anywhere from 5 to 50,000 titles.

  • A UK telephone help-line.  Immediate free help, whenever you want.

  • Whilst the service is designed for you to promote your own book business in any way you want, you'll also receive free publicity for your books through the main UKBookWorld.com website where everybody's books are listed together.


    • Additional help to promote your business
    Assistance to help you promote your book business using our free UKBookLink service and advice on the proper use of keywords when cataloguing.


    Who uses the UKBookWorld personal bookshop service already?
    Well over 400 British booksellers. Click here for their names and links through to their websites.


    Scale of annual charges
    You get a website address similar to www.ukbookworld.com/members/stern, with the final word being the User ID that you yourself choose as a sign-in name.

    You can easily link this to your own domain name if you have one.

    Maximum number of books you will be listing at any one time during the year
    Ordinary account
    (providing you with searchable listings on your own personal webpage and listings at UKBookWorld.com)
    Ordinary account PLUS UKBookGallery upgrade
    (greatly increases the chances of your more valuable books appearing on major search-engines)
    0 - 1,000
    £24 per year
    £24 + £24 = total £48 per year
    1,001 - 5,000
    £36 per year
    £36 + £36 = total £72 per year
    5,001 - 10,000
    £48 per year
    £48 + £48 = total £96 per year
    10,001 - 25,000
    £60 per year
    £60 + £60 = total £120 per year
    25,001 - 50,000
    £72 per year
    £72 + £72 = total £144 per year
    Over 50,000
    Enquire
    Enquire


    Whatever level of books you operate at, there are no further charges of any nature; no commission on sales, no hidden extras.

    The "no commission" aspect is particular important - there's no point paying commission on sales to your existing private customers by sending them to look through your books on a commission-based public database website.


    We design your webpage for you
    The UKBookWorld personal bookshop service gives a personal home page containing all the basic elements your website needs.  We'll design it for you based on the information you provide when you first register and have it up and running within a few hours of you registering.

    Click here for a working example of what your page will look like.  You can amend the precise wording and subject area links after you see the preliminary design.

    We're happy to make any subsequent changes to the wording on your page without charge although we reserve the right to impose a modest charge should you want us to make frequent changes.


    Easy to maintain
  • You need to have catalogued your books on one of the standard booktrade databases, for example, Booklist, Bookseller, Homebase, PowerUp or BMS programs, or by any database capable of exporting industry standard UIEE format files, or by tab or tilde de-limited files produced by such programs as MS Access or Excel.

    If you haven't already got a desktop database, we recommend Booklist, the £22 database for British booksellers available from www.Booklist5.com and used by over 1,000 UK booksellers.

  • Otherwise, the file formats we accept are:

    a) UKBookWorld or ABE format export from Booklist and Bookseller software

    This is a tilde (~) separated text file with one record per line, consisting of the following fields in the following order:

    Book Reference ~ Author ~ Title ~ Publisher Info ~ Description ~ Price ~ Keywords

    The file shouldn't contain field headers; the first line of the file should be an actual entry.

    b) Tab-separated format datafile

    This has the same fields and field order as the format above but with the fields separated by tabs.

    The file shouldn't contain field headers; the first line of the file should be an actual entry.

    This is the format to use if you have your own bespoke database allowing you to export your data in a manner determined by you.

    c) PowerUp export file

    A data file exported in ABE/UKBookWorld format from the PowerUp database system.

    d) UIEE format

    This format is output by Booklist 4.2, Booklist 5, and HomeBase software, and a number of other packages.

    If you use the Homebase database, choose the "UIEE *.msg" format option when making your files for UKBookWorld within Homebase, NOT the default "Homebase *.txt" option.

    You can also use this UIEE format to delete books from the database at the same time as adding new ones.

  • You can update or change your stock to your bookshop whenever you want.  It's a simple matter of uploading a file from your own computer.

  • Uploads or changes are made overnight.  Send details of books-for-sale any time on one day, they'll be displayed on-line the day after.

  • Booksellers are asked to take all reasonable steps to delete books from their website immediately they have been sold (or are otherwise no longer available) irrespective of whether they have been sold through UKBookWorld or elsewhere.


    • Any restrictions?
  • The UKBookWorld service is designed for UK-based booksellers only.  All books must be priced in pounds sterling.

  • So as to maintain a reasonable quality of book entries across the UKBookWorld service, we automatically filter out books priced below £4.

  • The UKBookWorld service should not be used for listing NEW books, except where only a few new titles held in stock for immediate supply are listed along with a much larger selection of old books in a specialist subject area.

  • UKBookWorld must not be used to offer any books, whether old or new, for sale which the bookseller does not hold in stock but intends to obtain from another bookseller or publisher solely to meet orders.  This is an absolute condition.  Booksellers must themselves own and hold in stock any books they list for sale using the UKBookWorld service - they must not offer books for sale on behalf of other booksellers or publishers.

  • UKBookWorld is not a suitable venue for the sale of "print-on-demand" type titles (one-off reprints, often photocopies, of early texts).  Booksellers are requested not to include such titles in their listings.

  • UKBookWorld reserve the right to remove all the listed books of any bookseller, without refund of any fees paid, if complaints of unsatisfactory or unreasonable trading practices, are received.


    • You set up your on-line bookshop today
    After you've read the rest of this section, use the clickable link at the end to go to UKBookWorld and complete the registration form.

    When registering, it's best that you make your chosen sign-in User Name (sometimes called the User ID) bear some relation to your trading name as your ID becomes part of your website address.  This will make it easier for your customers to remember your website address.  Your confidential password, which you also have to choose, can be as complicated as you want it to be.

    Having registered, you can immediately start uploading your stock - if you've already catalogued your books, your personal website could be up and running by tomorrow morning.

    We'll send you an email request for your first year's subscription after we've set up your home page.

    Click here to complete the registration form (ignore any comment about cookies not being enabled on your computer, and simply continue).

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