Do You Need a Website?

The first question should be: do you need a website at all? And the honest answer is no. You can get along quite well without one. Will it help you sell books? Yes — especially if you have a specialized inventory. But you'll have to weigh the costs carefully. Not just the monetary costs, but the time you'll spend building and maintaining it.

The Simplest Option: A Business Card Site

The most practical option for most small dealers is a simple site that tells buyers who you are, what you sell, and where to find your inventory. Contact information, a short description of your specialities, and links to your ABEBooks and Biblio stores. That's it. Just the fact that you've gone to the trouble of setting up a site gives you slightly more credibility with buyers — it signals that you're a real, established operation rather than someone who listed a few books last week.

This is the approach that makes the most sense for general dealers. It's low cost, low maintenance, and does the job.

A Catalogue Site

You can maintain your own catalogue as static HTML pages and update them periodically. No shopping cart, no secure server — just ask customers to email with orders. Plenty of booksellers have done this successfully, and it gives the closest approximation to a traditional bookseller's catalogue. The drawback is that static catalogues are time-consuming to maintain, and over time you'll almost certainly get slower with the upkeep.

A Searchable Database

The most powerful option is a searchable database with your full inventory, updated automatically. The easiest to maintain once it's running — you just sync your inventory whenever you add or remove titles — and the most useful for customers. Also the most expensive and complex to set up. That said, the landscape has changed considerably since this article was first written. Platforms like Squarespace and WordPress with WooCommerce have made database-driven sites much more accessible, and there are bookseller-specific solutions worth researching if this is the direction you want to go.

A middle ground that works well for many dealers: embed your ABEBooks or Biblio search directly into your own site. Both platforms provide embed codes that let buyers search your inventory without leaving your site — though they do end up on the platform to complete the order. This is a practical compromise that requires almost no technical skill.

One More Thing

If you build it, they won't just come. A website that nobody can find is no website at all. Make sure your site is listed correctly with Google, that your business name appears consistently across your ABE and Biblio profiles, and that your site has enough real content — descriptions, specialities, some personality — to give search engines something to work with. A page that's just a name and a link to ABE won't rank for much.