Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 3)

Jeff Cohen: Let’s say you are at the University of Denver and you wanted to open up a local online textbook price comparison and market it on campus to all the people you know—that was easy to do. But it was difficult to take that concept at an individual campus level and scale it across the country. By creating a platform and partner program, we made it even easier for people to enter our market space because we took most of the technology out of the development and put it into a single API for people to be able to program against. By doing that, we were able to enable more competition in the space at the micro level.

We were allowing college students to create their own little businesses that they would run while they were in college and generate their own local marketing effort. Typically what happens is that a college student can make some good money from doing this but it wasn’t full-blown income. As the college students would leave school, the site would typically die off and new ones come on. The pivot really occurred in saying, “Here’s a market that we can either compete in from a marketing perspective and constantly try to market to college students who are coming into our market and remind them that we have 25% turnover in our customer base every year as new freshmen come in and students graduate.” We can either continually market to these college students to come to our site or we can develop a technology, which allows other people to develop websites and let each of them become great at what they do well in terms of marketing and get a small piece of everybody’s pie. That was the logic behind the development of the partner program.

Sramana Mitra: How much money does that generate? What kind of numbers are we talking here?

Jeff Cohen: The college bookstore market is a multi-billion dollar industry. A national price comparison website could easily generate multiple millions of dollars in textbook sales. A local site could easily generate hundred to two hundred thousand in local textbook sales. For an entrepreneurial student who wants to use our application to build a local price comparison and market it at their school, they could easily generate $100,000 to $200,000 worth of sales in a given semester, which could translate into $8,000 to $10,000 of income for that student. Like I said, it’s not necessarily a sustainable business, but as a side business for a college student, it really can become a nice source of cash. The challenge is that there are only two main peak seasons for them in building their business.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks
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