In today’s fast-paced book industry, ensuring your titles are correctly displayed across retail platforms is critical to maximizing sales and visibility; however, many book publishers do not have a plan in place to monitor retail analytics, causing their sales to suffer as a result.
Eloquence on Alertis the industry’s leading and most advanced retail compliance auditing platform—built specifically for the book publishing industry. We monitor your titles online so you don’t have to.
What is Retail Analytics?
Retail analytics is the process of collecting and studying retail data to discover trends, predict outcomes, and make better, more profitable business decisions. Retail compliance is ensuring that what is presented in retail is what you’ve planned it to be. Publishers invest a lot of time, money, and energy to ensure their product information is correct before it goes to market. The last thing we want is for publishers to leave it to chance that their metadata is showing up correctly on retailer websites, because the unfortunate reality is that it often does not.
As a matter of fact, on any given day, about 33% of metadata sent to market is NOT displayed as intended. Online retailers regularly make unapproved changes to your metadata, including the title, author, and pub date. Not to mention, there are plenty of other concerns that publishers may not be actively monitoring, such as:
- Cover image incorrect, missing, or poor quality
- Missing Buy Buttons
- Pricing errors
- Product being listed as out of stock
- Product page disappearing entirely
- Fake reviews and ratings
So why is retail compliance auditing important? Easy – NOT watching your titles in the marketplace can (and probably does) cost you sales.
This is a True Story.
Once upon a time, a book publisher sent out brand new pricing updates for a large selection of their hardcover books. However, Amazon mis-imported their data and instead imported those price changes into the paperback titles—while the hardcovers remained untouched! This resulted in their paperback titles being way overpriced, considering that paperbacks are usually cheaper than hardcovers.
Naturally, this had an immediate impact on their sales. All sales of the paperback titles whose prices were altered began going to third-party sellers. However, this story has a happy ending!
Luckily, because this book publisher was monitoring their retail analytics using Eloquence on Alert, they were able to catch this problem within 24 hours – with little impact on their sales.
The Cost of Non-Compliance
Eloquence on Alert has monitored tens of thousands of products – every single day, for seven years. We’ve found that on any given day, about 3% of titles industry-wide are missing a Buy Button. As seen by the image below, if a publisher had about 1,800 titles for sale, with an average price of $19 and average unit sales of 500 per day, having 3% of their Buy buttons go missing could potentially cost them $58,000 a year.
Overall, missing Buy Buttons could potentially cost the industry $1 billion in sales annually!
Third party sellers are another threat to the industry that publishers don’t always keep track of. Almost 20% of book publisher sales are lost to third party sellers on a given day. There also seems to be a monopoly amongst third party sellers where the Top 30 make up about 50% of Buy Box wins from publishers and over 50% overall utilize Amazon fulfillment (FBA).
With Eloquence on Alert, you’d be able to see which third-party sellers are winning your Buy Box and track that activity over time.
What Exactly IS Eloquence on Alert?
Eloquence on Alertis an interactive platform for book publishers to regularly monitor data displayed by online retailers. Alerts and/or reports are provided to users on vital data issues or concerns that can negatively (or positively!) impact sales and discoverability.
Eloquence on Alert can alert you when:
- Pricing is different from what you send
- Cover image doesn’t match what you send
- You get more reviews and/or ratings
- Buy button is missing from your product
- Buy button goes to third-party seller
- and more!
The main problem is publishers have SO many titles and so very little time. Not every publisher has the time, resources, or manpower to invest in retail compliance auditing. Unfortunately, as a result, these problems are slipping by unnoticed causing you to miss out on sales and potential opportunities.
That is the magic of Eloquence on Alert.
Eloquence on Alert is a unique tool that provides publishers with hard-to-access data from online retailers, allowing publishers to monitor these many problems, react promptly and accordingly—and ultimately sell more books!
But Wait – There’s More?!
Our staff have recently made some amazing additions to make this unique tool even more efficient.
- New comprehensive dashboards now include the most common reports and retail issues for publishers.
- Publishers can now monitor their entire catalog at different frequencies that make sense for each title (daily, weekly, etc.) and easily turn monitoring on or off for products.
- Users get alerts on reports that are most relevant to their specific business needs and that include new features, such as Impact Scores, which allow publishers to easily prioritize and monitor data issues.
- Our new tiered pricing module offers better affordability for all publishers!
Don’t Leave Your Metadata to Chance
It’s time to increase your visibility and take control of your data. With Eloquence on Alert, publishers can rest easy and gain peace of mind knowing that their products are being accurately represented across the retail landscape. Don’t let online retailers derail your hard work—sign up for Eloquence on Alert today!
For questions about the product, contact our Director of Sales and Education, Joshua Tallent (joshua@firebrandtech.com) OR click hereto schedule a free demo.