BEST SELLERS

August 2017

“The 91-Storey Treehouse” and seventh book of Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton’s wacky treehouse adventures totals a huge 2737 sales for the month of August. “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls” comes in 2nd with 651 with the “Barefoot Investor” close behind at 585. See the complete Top 50

KPI's

Sales in August - this year vs last year

• ALL - 6.01%
• Australia - 4.7%
• New Zealand - 8.96%

Clearly a difficult environment at the moment especially in NZ ahead of a very close election. See Backoffice > Reports > Monthly Sales to see YTD trends.

Book contribution to the ecomomy

PWC recently released a report in New Zealand on the contribution publishing makes to the economy in terms of GDP, employment and wider impacts.

While this is about NZ the findings I think are also applicable to Australia and in particular what the industry is up against. Your competition is not the shop down the road or even Amazon. It is for peoples time. This has implications about how the industry should market itself.

See the full report here ...

Your votes on what we should do next

1. If stock is out of stock/not available yet, but is on order - can we show this on the website
2. Want to be able to bulk change secondary categories (not just one at a time).
3. The ability to apply credits notes to accounts from the back office and apply them to invoices.

See the full list here...

New features this month

• Reading level special field added (Video 1:34)
• Browser based system to alert you when a new orders come in. (Video 1:34)
• Secondary category display added to customer orders to support warehouse operations. (Video 1:04)
• Flexible sorts for different categories, (good if you run events) (Video 3:04)
• Gardners P&A integration  (Video 0:36)

What Next

Plans for the coming Month

• To continued the focus on bedding in
  • Agency
  • New website
    • Layout tidiness
    • Website speed
    • Smooth and intuitive process flows
    • Data analytics
• Overall system speed and stability

Things we are working on that are likely to take longer

• Central reporting for groups
• Setup wizard
• Further SEO and website performance monitoring

New things we want to make a start on

• Rails 4 upgrade
• Ruby 2.2 upgrade
• New billing system

Beyond the next month

• Use of docker to dynamically scale the system based on demand.
• Bootstrap 3 upgrade in the back office (Currently in design phase)

Warwick Schaffer
Founder