Today we’re introducing the fruit of that labor, which we call Buyback Compete. It’s live now, and it’s available at no additional charge to existing Verba Compete clients.

Chart Your Whole Buyback

Existing Verba users know all about the competitiveness chart, which plots out store retail price vs. the online marketplace for every book in your catalog. Now we’ve applied the same concept to buyback.

Just import your current buyback price and desired quantity for each ISBN, and we’ll give you something like this:

On the left-hand side of the chart, you’ll see books where the marketplace is outbidding you for student books. On the right-hand side you’ll see books where you’re paying more than the marketplace is offering. Which leads us to…

One-Click Savings

As the chart above indicates, every store has a number of books for which their buyback price is higher than it needs to be. Buyback Compete helps you capture those savings in one fell swoop. Just click the “Match Lower Prices” button in the Recommendations panel and you’re good to go.

Get Organized, Dig Down

Of course, not all pricing decisions can be made with one click. Buyback Compete puts all you need to know about the competition at your fingertips, so you can make informed pricing decisions for each book you’re buying back.

Quick Filters

It starts with Quick Filters, which allow you to isolate the group of books you want to work with. Looking to tackle those books where the online marketplace is offering a more compelling buyback price? Just click the “Underpriced” filter and you’re off to the races.

Decision Panel

As you work through your catalog, use the Decision Panel to keep track of prices you’ve settled on. For each book, you can lock in your Original (imported) buyback price; match the top online competition’s offer; or set a custom modified price.

Worked and Watched Titles

Locking, matching, and saving a price all designate the book as “worked.” At any point, you can use the “Not Worked” Quick Filter to look at books awaiting your attention.

Even if a book has been “worked”, you can click the star icon to the left of the title to mark a book as one to watch. And yep, there’s a “Watched” Quick Filter too.

The Details

Want to know more about that “Online” price we’re showing in the Decision Panel? Just click the “Show Details” button to reveal Verba’s most recent data on the buyback offers we’re seeing in the online marketplace.

You’ll get a table view of all those offers:

Buyback Compete also gives you a visual sense of how on (or off) your currently selected buyback price is. And you can hover a point on a scatterplot to see details about that offer.

With the Details area, there’s no longer any need to jump around competing buyback sites to inform your pricing decisions: it’s all in one place.

Assessing the Impact

The whole time you’re working through your catalog, Verba keeps track of the impact your decisions may have on the buyback bottom line.

The “Estimated Savings (Loss)” calculation takes your estimated buyback quantities, and the difference between your current and original buyback prices, and multiplies them to put a dollar number on your price changes. We provide these calculations for your whole catalog, and for the books you’ve currently filtered down to.

As in most of Verba Compete, green is good: it means your price changes have led to a store savings. A red number means you’re laying out more cash with your modified pricing than with your originally imported prices.

Easy Export

When you’re ready to update pricing in your back-office system, Buyback Compete comes with an easy export option. From your original price, to the online marketplace price we’re seeing, to your saved/modified buyback price, it’s all there.

Just A Start

Like all Verba applications, the Buyback Compete module will keep evolving, and we’ll roll out those updates free of charge. Client feedback is our single biggest source of improvements, so if you can spare a couple minutes going into this busy buyback period, we’d love to hear what you think.

And if you’re not yet a client, but like what you see, header over to our Contact page to learn more about Buyback Compete and our other cutting-edge services.

The entirety of the Verba product suite – Verba Compare, Verba Compete, and Verba Collect – will now have data integration with the Sequoia system. No more laborious files, no more frustration.

Our goal is to maximize the time store teams spend on strategic pricing, sourcing, and marketing decisions. With Sequoia’s help, this integration gets us further along with this goal than ever before. Best of all, there are no additional fees for the integration.

Head over to our partnership page to get more details:

http://www.verbasoftware.com/partners/sequoia

As always, feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or thoughts on the integration: email us at help@verbasoftware.com, or give us a ring at (415) 738 – 2374. Sequoia can be reached at (800)-818-5018.

Inkling works with publishers to convert their content into beautiful, media-rich digital textbooks. While Inkling texts are currently only available on iPad, they represent the bleeding edge in digital course materials. As Lara Konick at University of Washington’s University Bookstore told us:

We’ve been watching the innovations that Inkling has brought to course materials this past year, and we are so excited to be offering their content to our students through Verba.

We’re really proud to be the first and easiest way for campus stores to make Inkling available to students. You can check out the full press release here.

The Google eBookstore has the single largest selection of eBooks on the web – over 3 million titles and counting. Google eBooks are device agnostic, which means they can be read on any computer, smart phone, or tablet.

Fully-Managed Retailers

Both Inkling and Google eBookstore come into Verba Compare as fully-managed retailers. This means that Verba clients can activate both retailers with a flip of a switch on their Retailer Settings page:

One-Stop Digital Strategy

As options proliferate, Verba is working hard to make campus stores the hub for digital course materials. Alongside Inkling and Google eBookstore, client stores can also offer eBooks and eChapters from CengageBrain, CourseSmart, Barnes & Noble’s NookStudy, and Textbooks.com.

Brian Fetterman at Forty-Niner Shops, Cal State University Long Beach, says:

Using Verba Compare we’ve been able to add tons of rental digital content without doing tons of extra work. We adopt books into our system just as we always have and Verba Compare does everything for us. It just works.

Any questions about these great new affiliates, or about digital in general? Just ask.

For the short version, just take a look at the following video:

For details and pretty pictures, read on…

The Algorithm

We’ve always known that the average student is willing to pay a slight premium for the comfort and convenience of buying from a physical campus retailer. With nearly 100 stores providing totally price-transparent shopping environments through Verba Compare, we now have a ton of great data about what that premium is, and how it differs by price point.

These student preference insights have been fully integrated into our recommendation algorithm, resulting in substantially more accurate competitive pricing recommendations for our entire client base.

Simplified, Stored Pricing Parameters

In addition to student preference data, we’re incorporating some ‘best practices’ that our clients have developed directly into our pricing algorithm. Integrating these practices cuts down on the number of pricing parameters clients must address.

Also worth noting, these pricing parameters are now found and stored on the Settings page, where they can be revised and updated at any time.

Introducing Status Indicators

Since we’re now storing client pricing parameters, we can also store the recommendations the engine produces for each book, which allows us to organize books into three categories:

Once clients have stored their pricing parameters, top-line item counts for each status category will appear on the Dashboard. Each status has a link to check out all books with that status in Quick View.

Status Indicators and Recommendations in Quick View

We rolled out Quick View a few months ago so users could rapidly jump between books in their catalog. With status indicators and recommendations, Quick View becomes even more effective.

Each book in the left-hand panel now carries a status indicator, as shown below, so it’s easy to see which books need some sort of adjustment, and how drastic a change they require.

At the top of the page, you’ll now see the Status Bar, which is comprised of green, yellow, and red segments.

The width of each color segment represents the percentage of your catalog that falls under that status level. To see all books with a given status, just click one of the color segments.

For example, clicking the yellow segment will reveal all books for which Verba has a recommendation on your new or used pricing.

From there, it’s now easier than ever to find and lock in Verba’s recommended price:

Once a recommendation has been accepted, the variant’s status immediately turns green.

Jump to the next book to rinse and repeat. Just like that, Compete clients can now quickly establish competitive, market-based pricing for the majority of their inventory.

Wrapping Up

We hope our current clients enjoy the big update! Future clients can check things out at the Verba Compete Sandbox. Feel free to give us a ring at 415-738-2374, or shoot us a note at help@verbasoftware.com.

While we hope clients will like the convenience of having a single management interface for both applications, we’ve accomplished some bigger goals by bringing Compare and Compete together, and paved the way for some great new features. Here’s what to look for:

Speed!

The new infrastructure is faster, more reliable, and more responsive on both the Compare and Compete sides. From processing imports to jumping between books in Quick View, clients can expect a rapid-fire user experience.

Improved Catalog Management

Showing and hiding terms in the old Compare interface wasn’t as intuitive as we wanted it to be. With the improved Settings page in Compete, users now have flip-of-the-switch control over which terms students have access to.

Sales Analytics for Compare-Only Clients

For a long time, the Compare-Compete division has meant that Compare-only clients have a hard time accessing their sales analytics. Starting today, every Compare-only store gets access to the same great checkout and affiliate earnings data that Compete users have enjoyed.

Some Other Tweaks

The simplified infrastructure has given us the opportunity to address some things we’ve wanted to do for a while. For example, on the student side, we now only show departments that are specific to the selected term. While these kinds of changes are small, taken together they make for a cleaner, more navigable user experience.

And More To Come…

Having Verba Compare and Compete in the same “stack” makes it easy for us to develop integrated features between the two. Want to know how that book you’re looking at in Compete looks to students visiting your Compare site? We’ll soon be able to jump right out to the comparison page for the course in which the book is used.

And with department, course, and section data now in Verba Compete, we have more ways than ever to analyze your store pricing and student preference data. This can lead to specific policy recommendations (“Work with Engineering to get adoptions earlier,” or, “Encourage history professors to allow old editions”) that contribute to both store competitiveness and textbook affordability.

Stay tuned!

There are a couple of trade-offs here. Since Amazon has a broad business-to-business infrastructure built out, they’re able to offer invoicing features and, in some cases, even lines of credit to campus retailers.

However, we feel these features are mere luxuries compared to having quantity information available when purchasing from the online marketplace. Without quantity data, stores can’t control the number of boxes flooding Receiving, and the number of credit card line items Accounts Payable must reconcile. Online sourcing without quantity data is a logistical crap shoot.

As our friends at BookVolume point out in their post on the topic, “Most ‘Power Sellers’ who list books in quantity on Amazon typically sell on the other marketplaces too.” We expect Half.com to be every bit as useful for stores looking to supplement their long-term wholesaler partnerships with targeted online sourcing.

UPDATE

Wyatt Waterman at Wheaton College Bookstore gave us the following heads up:

Let me add this to your email:  paperback shipping through Half is actually $3.49 for the first copy and $1.89 for each subsequent copy from the same seller.  Also, Half will give you one “invoice” for all the books you purchase on one transaction, while Amazon gives you a separate invoice for each seller—a ton more paperwork is generated through Amazon.

Adoptions collection is one of the primary interactions the bookstore has with the faculty community. We want this interaction to be painless for instructors, and we want the bookstore to get all the credit.

That’s why we’re introducing full bookstore branding and color-theming on all instructor-facing pages. Give us a color and a logo and Verba Collect will do all the rest.

We’ve also modernized (read: simplified) the instructor interface and inserted intelligent notifications to provide guidance and feedback throughout the adoptions process.

Altogether, we think this version of Collect is the easiest way yet for instructors to get your store their adoptions, and they’ll have you to thank for it.

Self-Assignment

Until now, Verba Collect has functioned best when a bookstore assigns an instructor (complete with name and contact information) for each section in the catalog. This week we’re introducing an optional complement to that approach called self-assignment.

Self-assignment allows any visitor to the adoptions website to create an account using a verified email address. Once they’re in the system, users can assign themselves to sections for which adoptions have not yet been submitted. From there, everything works as usual – they can compile course materials lists, submit them, and receive email notifications and confirmation about the status of their adoptions.

Existing users can also add themselves to courses and sections when this option is enabled. When combined with a decent database of instructor names and emails, self-assignment makes Verba Collect an even more powerful way to efficiently gather and manage adoptions from the faculty community. To learn more about the new self-assignment option in Verba Collect, check out our documentation Wiki.

System Emails Revamp

Verba Collect harnesses a series of automated emails to keep the adoptions process rolling. The new version of Collect comes with significant enhancements to these emails.

As an adoptions platform driven by email notifications, emails from Collect can pile up for certain users. This version of Collect gives store staff a lot more control over which user levels receive which classes of email. Now the store can decide which emails are important, reducing clutter, and keeping instructors focused.

The actual content of emails from Collect has also been restructured to include key information about what the user has to do. Here’s an example:

You are assigned to submit textbook adoptions for:
3 sections from 2 courses.

So far, you have submitted a textbook adoption for 2 sections.
The following 1 sections need a submission from you:
MATH 2510 – 10

Lastly, we’ve implemented a highly requested feature: adoption confirmation emails. Now, whenever the bookstore accepts an adoption, Verba Collect automatically notifies the instructor who submitted the adoption to let them know about it. The email contains a list of all accepted course materials, so there’s no confusion between store and instructor.

New Edition Alerts BETA

We’ve also implemented another widely requested feature in the form of new edition alerts. By connecting editions in our database, Verba Collect can now tell instructors (or bookstore staff) when a newer edition of a given book is available.

Clicking on the new edition alert takes the user to a list of one or more editions with more recent publication dates than the original edition. This feature should help Collect clients cut down on time spent chasing older editions.

And that’s not all…

These are just some of the larger improvements in the latest version of Verba Collect. Users will also appreciate a number of smaller features, like the ability to send test emails.

We’re looking forward to feedback from existing Collect customers. And for those of you who are looking for a more sophisticated, efficient adoptions process, it’s not too late for this go round! You know where to find us.

The inclusion of Verba has had two immediate effects. Connely said the site helps her staff make quick adjustments to the pricing of textbooks based on competitors’ offerings. Also, “If the student clicks on the link to a third-party vendor, the bookstore receives a commission,” she added. “Not only are our sales strong right now, but we’re getting commissions from places we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”

If you’re interested in the article, you can check it out here. Congrats to Kristen on her team on the attention, and an auspicious start to rush!

The University of Washington’s CEO Bryan Pearce does an excellent job presenting both UW’s textbook rental partnerships and its Verba comparison shopping site. You can catch it in the article at this link. Or you can watch it in the video below – comparison textbook shopping is discussed the second segment starting at about 2:06 (sorry for the ads):

The goal is to erase the negative perception many students have about book store pricing, and so far, it’s working. “Previously I just used Amazon, but now I use [the comparison shopping website],” said UW student Kevin Bukoskey.

It’s great to see stories about the successful efforts of stores to save their students money. Congrats to University Book Store!

Several campus bookstores are fighting back against online retailers by offering their own price-comparison Web services…. Nearly 100 college bookstores have added the research feature to their Web sites with the help of a company called Verba, started by recent Harvard University graduates.

And the strategy seems to be working:

Estella McCollum, director of KU Bookstores at the University of Kansas, which set up the service last year, said that she was nervous at first, but that in about 80 percent of the cases, students chose to buy from the bookstore rather than from an online competitor. The site tracks when students do choose alternatives and recommends price cuts to store managers. And when students do click through to the Amazon.com link, the bookstore at least makes a small commission for sending them.

To take a look at the full article, hop on over to the Wired Campus blog here.