Q&A: What do you think of this new bookselling service?

QUESTION: I read this solicitation today and would like your opinion. The owner of the Web site distributed this message, complete with these misspellings:

To all Book Sellers!

A new service has been launched to offer private booksellers tools to open their own personal on-line bookstores. It menas that your customers will come to your bookstore and will see only the books that you sell. This service is significantly cheaper than amazon.com or any other on-line private bookstores.

You can visit out site at http://www.booksupply.org and open your own bookstore in minutes. The bookstore activation and hosting is free and you never pay a dime until your book sells. As a payment method it uses PayPal, which offers protection for buyers as well as sellers.

Thank you for you time,
BookSupply.org

ANSWER: It's a very attractive Web site, but it appears to be quite new. In fact, Alexa.com, which ranks Web sites by their traffic, has no information about this site, which means it's practically brand new and has no traffic.

It's not enough to simply list books on the Internet. You'll need to put them on a site that already attracts shoppers, or you'll need to invest the time in building such a site.

I'm also skeptical of a service provider who hasn't taken a moment to run their debut marketing message through a spell-checker. And I'd want to know the name and physical address of someone who's offering to host my business on the Internet, none of that information is provided.

On the BookFinder discussion list yesterday, I read where this domain was registered by someone with a Russian e-mail address, which is obviously a red flag.

Several vendors in this area have long track records and hundreds, if not thousands, of satisfied customers, including Chrislands and White Oak Books. Before doing business with BookSupply.org, I would want to see some links to its existing bookstore clients or testimonials on its Web site.

If I've been overly cautious about BookSupply and they do provide a reputable, competent service, I'll be very glad to hear about that.
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