More about the new Paradoxal Press Online Store

Some of you may wonder about the new Paradoxal Press online book store. Does this mean that I am moving from publisher to retailer?

Hell No! The idea behind the online book store is to provide added value to our customers. Why only buy our books on ParadoxalPress.com when you can buy almost all the books you need directly from the same source. Also, since our main source of income is from our own publishing efforts, this means that we can offer our books at an everyday low price.

Most titles are offered at about 40% off retail, quite often beating Amazon’s pricing. We currently list over 40,000 titles. And we are in the process of adding more titles to our offering.

Currently, finding titles on our store may be a little difficult beyond browsing through categories. We are using Google’s search engine to index our content pages to allow for efficient searches through our site. But the reality is that with over 100,000 pages of content on our website, it is taking forever for Google to go through our site and index it. So I am currently searching for other means of offering some kind of searching mechanism. In the meantime, if you know the ISBN of the book you are looking for, you can easily look for it on our site since our book information pages are based on the ISBN number. For example, a title with an ISBN of 0976613220 could be found at the following page:

https://www.ParadoxalPress.com/store/book/0976613220.htmd

Going back to the original topic, our intent is to offer these books as an added value to our customers and our main goal will always remain publishing. So how can we run such a store without out it consuming too much of our time?

The key is “AUTOMATION”! Most of the books are dropped-shipped directly from our wholesaler (Ingram). They have a fairly sophisticated electronic order system that we can tie ourselves into to minimize the amount of work needed. The idea is to cover 95% of orders through our automation and deal with special cases manually. Since we just started, we are still developing our automation. But over the next few weeks, I intend to post more entries explaining the steps taken to implement our ordering system automation. Since most of my tools are developed using C#, it is a good exercise in .NET development and thought I would share my findings…