Digital Saved the Day for These Stores

Each store’s situation was a little different, but they all had a happy ending—as recounted in the CAMEX21 session, Maximizing Course Materials Sales by Creating a Convenient Virtual Shopping Experience.

“Students may not be directly on campus or walking into your store like they used to,” commented session moderator Lisa Montgomery, senior manager of marketing, Verba VitalSource. “If there’s one thing we also learned, it’s that stores are the heart of the campus, right? So that hasn’t changed even if their business models had to shift. The work of the campus store is now more important than ever.”

At the University of Dayton Bookstore, Dayton, OH, the COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for a fairly radical decision: ditching rentals of physical textbooks. Rentals had been successful, making up some 25% of the store’s overall sales, according to Director Julie Banks.

But then the pandemic shut down the campus. Students went home, and staff were cut. “We were really struggling to just figure out how to maintain the current business, with changes in staffing and just doing more with less,” Banks said.

“We realized in talking to our team and observing our processes that the administrative burden related to running a successful rental program had just become too great,” she said. Rentals had always been laborious—physically reclaiming the books and then turning them around for the next term—but with students no longer on campus, it suddenly got a lot harder.

“We just really found that it was becoming more difficult and more books were not getting back,” Banks explained. Penalties for late returns were not an option. “Our university doesn’t like to charge fees. There was some sensitivity around charging rental fees and collection fees.”

But rather than go back to selling just print copies, the store came up with a plan to find a cheaper digital option for each of the titles in the rental program. “The general execution really took some time,” she said. It started with getting buy-in from the administration, particularly the chief financial officer and the provost.

“We provided some transparency to how cumbersome the rental process actually was, from a collection standpoint,” Banks said. With backing from the provost, the store developed a comprehensive marketing program to get the word out to campus stakeholders about the switch from physical rentals to digital formats, including inclusive access for some courses and publisher digital rentals for others.

During the pandemic, the university had been sending out a digest of messages targeted to stakeholder groups to keep them informed. The store was able to include its own information in those messages, and also reached out to students and parents through virtual orientation. Individual faculty members were contacted to explain the impact on the materials for their specific courses.

“A lot of our time was spent more on the marketing standpoint and selling it to everyone, that it was going to be a change, but would be all right,” Banks said.

And in the end, it was all right. The UD Bookstore, which previously averaged just 30 e-textbooks per semester, now is handling tens of thousands. “I would not change the path were going down,” Banks said.

For the University Store at Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA, the pandemic not only meant students were no longer in the store, but staff couldn’t come in, either.

“We were all working from home,” recalled Manager Laura Heger. That turned out to be something of a blessing; with no need to run in-store operations, Heger had time to work with faculty to quickly ramp up the inclusive access program.

The store had piloted a small program in spring 2019 “so we had one and a half years under our belt in experience in working with inclusive access,” Heger said. But now the program needed to drastically increase.

It helped that the store hadn’t encountered any resistance to IA. After Heger met with her vice president to explain the benefits, “she was right on board with me from the start” and assisted in meetings with the provost, bursar, learning management system team, Campus Leadership Council, and president. 

“Everyone was so receptive from the beginning, really no negativity or pushback at all,” Heger said. Bloomsburg’s campus culture is centered on the students, so the store’s emphasis on IA “really helped our relationship with the campus, letting our campus know we are here for our students and they are our number one priority,” she added.

At first the LMS manager expressed some concern about potential problems for students, but after she researched IA programs at other schools, she was ready to partner with the store. Heger is able to view course pages in the system, and even posts links and announcements directly into the LMS for faculty, if requested. Knowing exactly what has been posted in the LMS has come in handy during rush, she said.

“The first couple weeks of classes, we do a lot of tech support for IA classes,” she said.

Inclusive access now accounts for about two-thirds of the store’s textbook business. “We’ve rounded the corner. Pretty sure this spring we will see an increase in textbook sales for the first time in quite a while,” Heger said.

The scenario for the University Co-op, serving the University of Texas at Austin, also involved the learning management system. UTA has never had its own bookstore, and the Co-op is considered the main store for the campus. But while it is owned by member students, faculty, and staff, the Co-op has no official affiliation with the university.

And that “causes barriers,” according to Michael Kiely, director of course materials at the Co-op. “The university is not real receptive to giving student information to outside entities, so it’s something that challenges us every day.”

About a decade ago, after extensive negotiations, UTA permitted the store to put a button on the students’ online schedule page.

“When students hit that button, it would just flip them over to the Co-op website and automatically fill the shopping page with all the books needed for their courses,” Kiely said. “That was huge, absolutely huge. That drove probably 90% of our web business.”

However, over the years, the sales derived through the button on the schedule page steadily declined for no apparent reason. “We’re just scratching our heads. What’s going on?” Kiely recalled.

Three years ago the Co-op decided to ask students how they were arriving at the store’s website. Nearly all said they keyed in the URL for direct access. When asked about the schedule page button, though, no one knew what the Co-op was talking about.

As it turns out, “that schedule page sat on a portal that just became obsolete to students,” Kiely said. Instead, students were heading to their course pages in Canvas to find out what materials they needed, and never saw the link to the Co-op.

Kiely said the store learned that Canvas contained a price-comparison tool that would display a link to the Co-op on the students’ course pages. “But we ran into that hurdle again, not being part of the university,” he said. 

For a couple of years negotiations didn’t get very far, and then the pandemic changed things. “In the summer, the university made the decision that it would be mostly online. Students wouldn’t have to come back to campus,” Kiely said. “That accelerated it.”

The institution was interested in making it easy for students to acquire their course materials, and once they realized the price-comparison tool in Canvas would enable students to check multiple sellers, not just the Co-op, UTA was all in. A link was inserted into each student’s campus account, taking them to a My Textbooks page.

“We finally implemented it on the first day of class,” Kiely said. “I would never recommend doing any sort of implementation like that on the first day.”

However, despite the fact that the comparison tool had not been promoted at all, the Co-op received 500 orders that first day.

The success of that partnership built a lot of trust with the university, Kiely said, and as a result UTA agreed to do an inclusive access pilot with the store. “It’s a pretty big deal,” he noted.

“The pilot was very successful,” he added. “Many of you have been doing IA for years. We’ve been able to take all your successes and share them with the university.”

Last fall, “we saw business come back,” Kiely said. “That was freaking awesome.”