Building Your Own Online Bookstore

Chrislands Bookstore Service includes a complete online bookstore for one low price. Features include:

# A professionally designed bookstore with integrated shopping cart.
# Chrislands hosts and maintains your site - No costly server fees for you.
# Chrislands provides all the software to support your store on our servers.
# You have no software to purchase or install.
# Chrislands integrates with your book inventory database program.
# No technical expertise required - you follow simple step by step instructions.
# Chrislands Bookstore service works with your current payment methods.

Use this banner to go to Chrislands for more info and to sign up.

Greetings,

Later today there will be a public announcement that AbeBooks has purchased Chrislands. We (Lance and Jaymes) agonized over the decision whether to accept AbeBook's purchase offer. Although the terms of the agreement are not being disclosed, the one area
of the agreement that we can disclose is that AbeBooks agreed to allow us to continue to operate Chrislands.com.
Before accepting the offer, we talked to Anirvan Chatterjee and Charlie Hsu at BookFinder.com.You may recall in 2005 AbeBooks purchased BookFinder.com. Anirvan and Charlie confirmed AbeBooks has allowed them to continue to operate BookFinder.com without dictating how BookFinder.com should be run. We will continue to operate Chrislands
in the same manner as always. Our commitment to Chrislands customers is not changing, our support is not changing, and our commitment to continually improving the stores will not change.
We are excited about partnering with AbeBooks because AbeBooks provides resources to Chrislands that we would not otherwise have available. The next improvement we will add is the capability for your books to be included in BookFinder.com search results. We are currently working with BookFinder.com on this new feature. We will soon release the details of how to integrate your store into Bookfinder.com
search results. It is our intent that the capability to be included in BookFinder.com search results is only the first of many improvements we can make using the resources that AbeBooks is making available to us.

Sincerely,
Lance and Jaymes

Chrislands Inc.

We will bring you any updates to this as and when they occur.

Absolutely. Integration with your current book database program is a feature that distinguishes us from other online store services. Updating your own online bookstore is done in the same manner as you update your listings on the book selling services like www.abe.com. You can upload/update your inventory by FTP or browser upload. Chrislands supports uploading from the following programs.

* BookRouter.com - Recommend
* BookTrakker - Highly Recommended
* Readerware
* Homebase
* BookHound
* Bookmate
* theArtofBooks.com
* FillZ.com
* Any program that can export in UIEE format
* Any program that can export in our tab-delimited format
* Any program that can export in our comma-delimited format

If you don't have a domain name, then Chrislands will help register a domain name for you (you can choose any .com, .net, or .org domain name that is available, such as www.YourBookStoreName.com)

If you already have a domain name, switching to Chrislands Bookstore service is an easy process. We will assist you in setting up your domain name to work on Chrislands Servers. When you complete the online application for our bookstore service you will provide us the information needed to start building your store. We will normally have your store operational within 5 to 7 business days. After the store is operational, it is just a matter of uploading your inventory from your database program.

If you are undecided as to whether to sign-up now, or in the future it is highly recommended that you reserve the URL (website address) ASAP, as you may find someone else will come along and buy it up!

Chrislands service offers you a number of ways to personalize your bookstore, including:

# Company logo
# Home page message and graphics
# Custom categories
# Privacy Statement
# Links Page
# About us page
# Contact us page
# Store policies page
# Off-Line Search Service Page
# Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Page
# You can add your own web pages

The monthly fees are based upon the size of your catalogue, the base fee of $9.99 is for upto 2,500 items rising in tiers to $29.99 for up to 30,000 items. Special rates are available to those stocking more than 30,000 items.

These fees are very competitive with other sites such as ABE, Albris, Biblio and Amazon. No Final Value fee or commission is taken on any sales making it even better value.

There is a one-off fee of $199.99 to set up your store in the first place, this includes working with you to build and design your site, which should be operational within 5-7 working days.

You can accept any method of payment you want. You have total control over what type of payments you choose to accept.

You can use any existing Merchant Account you already use to process payments or be directed to a recommended low cost merchant to handle credit card purchases.

You can use Google Checkout, or Paypal, both of which are easily integrated into your store.

The only restrictions on what you can't sell are specific types of goods/services, such as:

# Illegal substances and activities
# Gambling and pyramid schemes
# Products and services that infringe on copyrighted property of others

With hundreds of templates and a lot more control this solution for ecommerce does provide a great starting place. Though note that pricing is based on number of products available and if you have a stock of more than a few thousand you may wish to consider and compare prices with the Chrislands solution.

There are many occasions you will require a business card, whilst it may be fine to hand over your number or website details on a bus ticket or old bookmark, nothing compares to the professionalism of a Business Card.

Here we highlight 2 companies delivering quality products at good prices, both allowing you to customise the design and add your own graphics online -

Vistaprint are one of the UK's leaders in providing Business Cards. Although the hook is Cards are Free, this is based on a number of basic templates and your cards will have a small vistaprint ad on the rear (not very professional). They do offer an affordable pro-service where you can pay to upload your own image/design which is easy even for the novice, and this premium service does not carry the vistaprint ad on the reverse. They also try to get you to upgrade and buy more at almost every click, but they are still a reasonably good solution if you require cards.

Saxoprint are more specialist print provider, supplying postcards, flyers and all manner of paper printed materials. They are also very competitive on price whilst being a little more up-front about the actual costs.

Whilst many will make do with whatever is cheap, to make the best use of the biggest overhead you have, storage, you do need to carefully design your storage.
ShelfStore are one of the biggest suppliers and stock one of the biggest ranges of modular shelving units in the UK.
Shelfstore Shelving System is a multifunctional bookcase / shelving system for the home, office, shop, school etc. You can create any arrangement you wish from a simple shelving unit to a complete library or storage solution.
They have been distributing their system in the UK since 1979. The system is used all around the home and office as well as schools, collages, universities and local and central government. All components and made in Sweden and constructed from solid wood and sourced from sustainable forests.
The unique shelf support system allows shelves to take very heavy loads. A shelf measuring 80 x 30 cm can easily carry 100kg.
They have an interactive web site where customers can design a shelving system to fit their specific space.