A great-looking e-store is all very well, but what about the products?
A great-looking e-store is all very well, but what about the products?
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Dickens. They must have Dickens. That is usually my first tool to evaluate any site masquerading as an e-bookstore. It's what some of us use to separate the serious sellers from travellers on the enthusiastic "Let's All Embrace E-commerce" bandwagon. The truth online is, after all, much the same as it is offline: You're not a great bookstore if you don't have the books your customers want.
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Hence, Charles Dickens an author no bookstore can ignore; rather, someone no bookstore ought to ignore. We used the Dickens Test on CoralHub.com, a new entrant offering "more than 3 million books to choose from". The first 20 results were the same: A Child's History of England. No Great Expectations, no David Copperfield, no Pickwick Papers. They started to appear by the third page, by which point we had moved to another e-store.
To be fair, the site scored when asked to locate books related to Shakespeare. Its search algorithm sifted through prices effectively, and didn't take ages to do it either. Another thing we liked was the relatively uncluttered interface. The downside: None of the books we selected boasted even the bare bones of a synopsis. Why would anyone rely on recommendations from a site that had no real reasons for making those recommendations?
What CoralHub.com also claimed to offer, apart from the "dedicated marketplace for books" spiel, was the ability to let "sellers become buyers and vice versa". "Sign Up" for more information, it said. So we did. And waited for confirmation by email. Three hours later, we were still waiting.
Ultimately, what any shopping experience boils down to is the ease with which you get it done. CoralHub processes orders in much the way most other online bookstores do. For us, the inventory is all that matters. Until it gets a better selection, we are sticking to Amazon.com.
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