My Latest Venture (textbook prices)

[Dill]

I'm currently a college student, and like most college students, the outrageous price of textbooks has long bothered me. I recently made a price comparison website that searches through over 20 online merchants and finds the cheapest prices. For example: this biology textbook has a list price of of $173.00 but my search engine found 3 prices under $60.00. I think this is a very valuable tool and I would like to hear your all's feedback - especially if you can help me with some marketing ideas.

[MissBossLJ]

I think thats excellent! i thought of doing the same thing with food prices and getting all the supermarkets to sign up but unofortunately a company beat me to it! darrn!, how are you going to make money off thiss, by attracting high traffic and then selling off advertising space? or are you going the other way where these destinations youve located these books, are you approaching them to pay a fee to sign up to this as to the car insurance companies who are placed on websites like gocompare.com etc. Or even are u implementing both to earn revenue? By getting the website owners who are selling that book for $60 for example to join up and allowing them on your site you could also take a small percentage if your user clicks on that link and then goes through to purchasing. Really to implement all of the above i think first you should market to B2B - so contact all the people who own the sites that ur currently listing these items for, and then you my be able to gain revenue through that as i just mentioned, only after that i would say to focus on marketing to the consumer audience, and marketing then would be useful through even online student forums and on campuses all around.

[Dill]

MissBossLJ - thanks for all of the ideas. The plan right now is to earn a percentage of the sales generated through my links.

[jake_russell]

Great idea Dill. I have wanted something like this for a while. I am a college student and i pay way too much for books. I will definitely be using this.

[rogercbryan]

I'm currently a college student, and like most college students, the outrageous price of textbooks has long bothered me. I recently made a price comparison website that searches through over 20 online merchants and finds the cheapest prices. For example: this biology textbook has a list price of of $173.00 but my search engine found 3 prices under $60.00. I think this is a very valuable tool and I would like to hear your all's feedback - especially if you can help me with some marketing ideas.

I own a bookstore that sells a little over 150,000 books a year on the web. While your idea is great it is a tool that is part of Amazon's system. I'd like to see if your research leads you to places that finds books cheaper then they are listed on Amazon more then 50% of the time. If you could do that you would have something. I'm just afraid that Amazon's used books will always (90% of the time or more) be cheaper then any place else. This is based off of my experience in working with their pricing analytics system that ranks 6.5M different books against all Amazon sellers in order to determine sales price and market value in relation to sellability (against other books).

Let me know what your research shows as I sell about 1000 text books a month...