Wall bookshelves of Periplus Bookstore

I visited a Periplus bookstore on the main street of Ubud town more than one week ago. It was a nice bookstore with large collections of books about travel, art and culture and language. Books about Bali and Indonesia;  including Elizabeth Gilberth's Eat, Pray Love; dominated the shelves. Books about meditation, massage, spa, and yoga meditation got significant number of spaces in the bookshop. Most of the books were arranged neatly on wall bookshelves whose heights was around 2.5 meters. The color of the wall bookshelves was black with lights on the top of each of them. I like the layout of the bookshop. There was only one staff handling the store. He was sitting at the cashier table handling the POS cashier machine, supervising customers through CCTV cameras that were installed on the ceilings and doing the administration or the paper works of the bookstore.

There is another bookstore called Ganesha bookshop some 400 meters from this Periplus. It is smaller than the Periplus bookshop and it is run by 2 staff. Ganesha bookshop does not have a POS cashier machine. The staff of the bookstore calculate all of the transactions using a small calculator and records them on a book. It is interesting to see that Ganesha bookshop gets more visitors each day. Both the Periplus and the Ganesha bookstore use wall bookshelves to efficiently use their limited spaces. Customers of these stores are mainly international travelers who come from Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan and China. by Charles Roring

Ganesha bookstore serves foreign customers

I visited Ganesha bookstore a few days ago. In Balinese Hinduism, Ganesha is the god of knowledge. It was located in Ubud, a famous tourist destination in Bali island. It was not a big shop. The size of the bookstore was around 5 meters x 10 meters. Most of the books that were displayed on the shelves were written by foreign authors from Europe, Australia or North America about Bali and Indonesia. Ganesha bookstore also had a large collection of novels. One of them was Eat, Pray, Love (EPL) by Elizabeth Gilberth. The novel had been remade into a movie with the same name starred by Julia Roberts.
Bali is one of the provinces of Indonesia. Most of its inhabitants speak Bahasa Indonesia. However, the owners of the bookstore know that their main customers are not Indonesian but foreign tourists that come from as far as Amsterdam, Tokyo and Sydney. These customers need books about Indonesia or Bali that are written in English or their languages. In addition to books, other merchandises which it offers are newspapers, maps, postcards, and some traditional music instruments made of bamboo.
While in the Ganesha bookstore, I bought a map of Papua and Maluku islands. I really need the map when I have to guide tourists in Manokwari regency on bird watching and snorkeling tours. I was a little bit surprised to find out that the bookstore does not have POS (Point of Sales) system. It was manned by two women, one at the cashier table handling the transactions and one supervising the customers. The staff at the bookstore cashier only used a small calculator to calculate all of the transactions which would later be recorded on a book manually.
Ganesha bookstore in Ubud town of Bali island was quite busy during the day. I saw some European visitors. There was a Japanese couple there too. It was a nice bookstore. I recommend it to anybody who wants to visit Ubud – the culture center of Bali. So, next time when you go to Bali, don’t forget to visit the bookshop. By Charles Roring.

Designing a bookstore shopping cart

So, you want to design a shopping cart software for bookstore. I think, you don't have to. Today, there are a lot of e-commerce software that anybody can use to sell books on the internet. Free shopping cart software such as os commerce, and zencart can power your online bookstore.
Your are a bookstore owner not a programmer
As an owner of a bookstore, I don't want to make my life more complicated by trying to invent what somebody else has made. I prefer promoting my products to designing a new shopping cart software that requires an excellent knowledge in php or asp programming language. This is something that I cannot do.
Astore widget of Amazon.com
If you really want have an online bookstore so badly, you can sign up for an account in Amazon.com as an associate of the largest bookstore in the world. There will be a widget in your associate account called astore. You can embed it inside your blog or static website. Amazon.com has developed a cutting edge shopping cart software for the astore which you can use to make money online buy promoting it inside your blog or website. So, why do you have to invent a new wheel again?
In astore shopping cart software, you can customize its categories to adapt with the content of your website. To customize the astore, you need to sign in to your associate account in Amazon.com and click the astore tab. Inside your Amazon Associate account, you can also see the reports of the items that you have sold and the advertizing fee that you can collect from them and that will be paid by the largest online store in the world. by Charles Roring
Related article: Starting an online bookstore

How much does it cost to start a bookstore?

Starting a bookstore needs capital. If you are now planning to open a bookstore as your business, you need to make a market survey first before deciding how much you will invest for your bookselling business. From my personal experience, I opened my home based bookstore by investing 65 million rupiahs (Indonesian currency). It was in early 2007. If this amount is converted into the current exchange rate, it is approximately the same as 7,303 US dollars.
The amount of money that you will spend will be much lower if what you plan to start is an online store. You don't need bookshelves, or big show room for your online bookstore. You don't even have to order books from publishers if you open your bookstore as an associate of Amazon.com.
An associate of Amazon.com write reviews about products, not only books, that Amazon.com sell in their website. The reviews are uploaded into your own website or blog. If you use blogger, you can embed the product code of Amazon.com that you want to promote inside your blog post. When somebody buys the books, or electronic products, you will get some money from Amazon.com.
So, how much does it cost to start a bookstore? Suppose that you have a laptop and free internet connection. You don't have to spend even 1 dollar to start an online bookstore. What you need to do is set up a blog in blogger account. Write original/ content rich posts about anything that you know or you are an expert in. After that embed the products or books from Amazon.com inside your posts. You will begin to make money in no time. by Charles Roring
How much capital do you need to start a bookstore business?

online bookstore software

All online bookstore owners need POS software to run their business. In my previous posts I mentioned some open source e-commerce shopping cart that they can use to start and manage their online bookstore. Because the open source software are free, store owners only need to pay the webhosting package and install one of them for their online bookstore website.
I recommend OS Commerce and Zencart for your online business. However, if you are interested in a licensed software for security reason, you can buy VPASP. I do not want to give any comments whether licensed software is better or not because the security of transactions in online stores greatly depends on a lot of factors. Zencart or OS Commerce use mysql database system and PHP language to power the online store whereas VPASP uses ASP programming language. When dealing with customers, online bookstore that is powered by the software deals with the customers directly meaning that store owners or cashiers do not have to input each transaction data into the POS (Point of Sales) software of the store computer. All the transactions run automatically. Store owners will processed the transaction from the back office web-page of their websites.
I personally have tested both Zencart and VPASP. I prefer Zencart to VPASP because it is free and scalable. With Zencart e-commerce software, we can sell not only books from our online retail store but also music and e-books. I suggest that you install zencart or vpasp in your computer and practice using it before you can really start your own online bookstore. If you don't practice using it offline, you will not be familiar with its features or functions and as result your bookstore may not run properly when you operate it online.

Wooden wall bookshelves for a bookstore

Most bookstores need wall bookshelves to display the books that they want to sell to customers. The wall bookshelves have to be in inclined positions to make the books more visible when customers look at them. I personally designed my wall bookshelves between 60 to 70 degrees. Flat wooden panels have to be nailed at the bottom of the shelves to support the books so that they will not fall. Also with the inclined position, the books that are arranged will not buckle.
Picture 1 Inclined Bookshelf
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Perhaps you still don't understand my explanation, to help you understand how good wall bookshelves should be manufactured, please, see the following photograph. I designed the bookshelves by myself and had it made by a furniture company in my town. So far, I think that this is one of the best bookshelves that I have ever designed. Customers can see all of the books easily when standing around one and a half meter from wall.
Picture 2. Inclined Bookshelf for Bookstore
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Wooden wall bookshelves that have books on them will become very heavy. If your bookstore is located in an earthquake region, the bookshelves have to be screwed or tied to the wall to prevent them from falling. We never know when an earthquake hits our town. Nailing or screwing the wall bookshelves is a good way to ensure the safety of the customers who are walking through the aisles of the bookshelves. by Charles Roring

University Bookstore

Students often buy books from university bookstore because they can get used books that are offered in prices that are much cheaper than the prices of new books. However, the collection of books in a university bookstore is not as many as what we can find in general bookstore in the downtown or city center. University bookstore tends to sell books that are published by the university. Today, students have a lot of options to buy books that they really need. They can contact their friends in campus who have the books that they are looking for or they can just open their laptop and connect to the internet to search for the books both in the online bookstores or online libraries.
Internet offers a lot of information that we can get for free without having to spend money. For research purposes, the information that is available in the internet has to be verified with books that are written by professors or experts in certain university. Because most of the books or research journals are too specific to be sold by general retail bookstore, they can be provided by university bookstore to students who need them. Such books or journals are usually published in small number.
When I was a university students I didn't buy books from the university bookstore because there was no such bookstore in my campus. So, I could only rely on the university and faculty libraries for the books that I need. After borrowing them, I usually went to photocopy shop to duplicate certain pages of the books for my class assignment or research projects.