Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The students are making $8,000 to $10,000 a year and you have about 100 of these kinds of sites that you’re working with?

Jeff Cohen: I can’t give specific numbers but we have sites that do $100,000 a year in sales and we have sites that do multiple millions a year. They can be making anywhere from 6% to 10% commission on each sale.

Sramana Mitra: That’s essentially the business model. Let me revisit the question about trends. What is the thinking here?

Jeff Cohen: There are a couple of trends that I think are rather critical to our thought process. There is a trend where a lot of technology has moved into the API arena whereas 10 years ago, you built your own code internally. Now, you build all of your sites to be platform-based. We are really on the forefront of doing that back in the mid-2000s when we built out the partner program and we turned everything into an API. That was a major trend and is still a trend today.

Two is, we’ve partnered with developers who have created WordPress plugins. By developing the WordPress plugins, it really made it simpler for somebody to grab the plugin and put it into their WordPress site and develop their site. Our whole goal in following trends is to see how people are using the web and how we can make our tool work easier for them in building their site.

Sramana Mitra: What level of traffic does a WordPress site, or any site actually, need to have to be able to make $10,000 a year?

Jeff Cohen: We can’t look in terms of the level of traffic the way other sites would because of the seasonality of the business. If you have a website that has 10,000 registered users and they’re coming to your site on a regular basis and the majority of them are college students, offering them college textbooks is something that they’re going to go out and buy anyway. If you can provide them a tool for being able to do that, you can start doing the math yourself and say, “I have 10,000 students. I feel that maybe 20% of them will make a purchase. Therefore, I should have 2,000 sales. On average, my sales are going to be $50. So I’ve got 2,000 sales at $50.” You know you’re generating $100,000 in sales. Then, of course, everybody has to put in their own metrics into that because they might convert that at one, half, quarter, or twenty percent.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jeff Cohen, General Manager of CampusBooks
1 2 3 4 5