BookScouter continues to grow in traffic every season. With this growth comes increased customer service inquiries. One of the more frequent inquiries we receive asks us for our recommendation to whom they should sell a specific book. Despite BookScouter user reviews and price comparisons, it became clear that users wanted a vendor recommendation from BookScouter.

This proves challenging when our recommendation might change based on the book you might have searched; so in true BookScouter fashion, we’re allowing data to tell you who we are most likely to recommend. Therefore, we conceptualized what we’re calling the “Featured Vendor Box”. This box is BookScouter.com’s recommended vendor for a particular book and will adjust dynamically for each individual book based on a key set of criteria.

The BookScouter Featured Vendor Box takes into account the following criteria to determine which vendor we show as our recommendation to sellers:

• Status – Only vendors with Preferred status are eligible to appear in the Featured Vendor Box. If no preferred vendors qualify, the box will not appear.
• Price – Price is often the first and most important factor to a seller; thus it is the most heavily weighed data point in our current revision.
• Feedback** – We take into account a vendor’s BookScouter.com feedback score as means of quantifying the quality of service, as determined by BookScouter users.
• Speed* – Speed favors vendors who pay sellers more promptly as an average measure of time from when the book shipped to when payment was disbursed.
• Payment* – Vendors with more ways to pay sellers will appear more often than those with fewer ways of paying sellers, all other criteria being equal.
• Shipping* – Vendors offering free shipping with more carriers will appear more often than those with fewer carriers, all other criteria being equal.

* Not yet implemented. ** Partially implemented using placeholder data.

There are many other criteria we could add to make a very complex and comprehensive algorithm, but we would like to to keep things simple and transparent. Because this is a fairly new feature, expect the Featured Vendor Box to undergo further tweaking and adjusting over the next several months. However, we’ll post updates here when changes are made so that 1) users can know we’re performing the same due diligence they would (or should) do before selling their books to a vendor, and 2) that vendors know what criteria they’re being ranked upon and have a clear plan of action to improve their chances at appearing in the BookScouter Featured Vendor Box.

NOTE: Registered users are able to hide the Featured Vendor Box so that the ISBN pricing table shows higher on the page, limiting or even eliminating the need to scroll to easily compare vendor prices. To do this, simply visit the “My Profile” page and opt to “hide” the Featured Vendor.

Happy scouting,
Dustin Checketts
President

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