He isn’t Barnes & Noble nor Amazon.com, but Alex Neal’s company, CampusBooks. com, counts those two Internet behemoths as partners in his fledging business. The site that once resold textbooks now collects commissions whenever customers purchase their books from such major-league e-tailers as Amazon.
“What we do today is provide a service to students to do comparison shopping for the books they need,” Neal said. “At any given time, we have about 15 different bookstore partners on the site, giving customers a lot of choices.”
When the site was originally launched in early 1999, CampusBooks.com was a reseller, buying the books from suppliers and shipping them to buyers. The sales grew, but not at the rate Neal envisioned.
“We had low margins and higher overhead so we decided to change the business.”
Besides changing the business plan, Neal purchased Graduate Ltd., a locally based seller of licensed software and hardware to academic markets.
“It was a distressed sale, and the owner was close to bankruptcy. But it was a business that was profitable, had multiple channels, a good customer base and a retail store,” he said.
The biggest advantage was the business came with all these software licensing rights that Neal said would be impossible to obtain as a new company.
This year, the combined sales for the two separate companies will be about $1.5 million. Next year, Neal expects it to reach about $2 million.
Neal, 29, got his start in the world of e-commerce working as vice president of operations for Enternet, a local reseller of goods being sold via infomercials.
It was good training, but Neal felt he could do better on his own. He got the company going with about $150,000 from friends, family and a few angel investors.
Neal isn’t exactly sure how many customers he has (the bookstores are the ones that keep such data) but sales have been pretty good of late. “We did about 5,000 transactions in September, which was our best month,” he said.
While the economy is slowing, CampusBooks sales should continue to rise, Neal said.
“When the economy slows, businesses like ours aren’t hurt as much. Those who are laid off often return to school for retraining or getting new skills, and when they do, they have to buy books.”
