Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your target audience is all college students and the price comparison of textbooks is your sweet spot.

Jeff Cohen: That is definitely our sweet spot. The technology, theoretically, can be used in the comparison of any book. It’s not specifically tied to a textbook. The actual comparison of the prices could happen for everything from Fifty Shades of Grey to your basic biology textbook.

Sramana Mitra: For the 100 partners that you have, what are they using it for?

Jeff Cohen: I would say that their sweet spot is in the collegiate space. In many instances, their websites have collegiate traffic in some way, shape, or form. Either their primary service on the site is textbook price comparison or their secondary service is textbook price comparison. For the second case, their primary service might be content in selecting schools or offering tutorial services for college students. They have some type of service that markets to college students. They’re using us to supplement their income by having a textbook comparison tool on their site.

Sramana Mitra: How does the business model flow in all this?

Jeff Cohen: Our partner program is basically a revenue share model. We charge a nominal monthly fee to be part of our partner program, which gets you access to all of our technology and reporting platform. Then, we have a revenue model where we share a percentage of the revenue that’s earned on every textbook purchase. We, then, manage all of the technology and all of the relationship with all 36 plus merchant partners. Our customers only have to do one single API integration and then we provide them data points from three dozen plus textbook merchants on the web.

Sramana Mitra: What trends in the electronic commerce business does this align with? What prompted you to make the pivot from actually selling textbooks on your site to becoming a comparison shopping engine?

Jeff Cohen: The initial pivot from selling textbooks on our site toward price comparison happened in the early 2000s. The reason we did that was aligned with the fact that the process of acquiring books to distribute on your own is very capital-intensive. We pivoted into the price comparison arena because it allowed us to grow our business without having to have the massive capital required to warehouse and distribute books physically on our own. The second pivot occurred around 2008, when we moved from a CampusBooks website to being a CampusBooks platform. The reason for that pivot was because the competition within the price comparison industry was really strong. There were a lot of new players coming in and they were very fractional. It was very easy for you to spin up a price comparison website if you were at a university.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks
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