Customer Support Tip: Adding Tracking, Saving Sales

Customer Support team member DJ says "Adding tracking can save your life." This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but purchasing tracking and entering it online for your orders has the following benefits:

• If the buyer initiates a return for the reason "Item did not arrive," we'll provide them with the tracking details and the return won't be processed. If no tracking details are online, the return automatically completes.
• Providing the buyer with the tracking details allows them to check on their order without having to contact you. An updated buyer is a happy buyer, and you'll have fewer e-mails to respond to.
• Reducing returns for the reason "Item did not arrive" increases your completion rating and more completed sales means larger payments for your orders.
• If you include tracking for all of your orders, you can add this information to your Shipping Terms. Many buyers find tracking details reassuring so will choose to order a book when they know it will be included.

Check Help Central for instructions for adding tracking to your orders online.

Search Results Test

Over the next month, 10% of visitors to AbeBooks will see a new version of the search results. The sidebar on the right is gone, and the refinements have been moved to the top of the page to display more search results on the page. We're tracking sales and clicks on both versions to determine whether to launch the new version for all buyers and booksellers in the new year.

Customer Advisory Board Survey Results

Interested to know what kind of attributes buyers like to search for? We asked the Customer Advisory Board about editions, conditions, signatures and more. We'll use this information to update our list of search refinements. Here are the results.

• 66% of respondents said they like to sort their search results by lowest price first. The remaining buyers were fairly evenly split between highest price, author A - Z, title A - Z and newest (most recently added to AbeBooks).
• 65% of respondents prefer the term "Used" for books that aren't new. 10% favored "Exclude new books," and the remaining were divided between "not new," "secondhand," and "previously owned."
• 13% of respondents said they've searched for Limited Edition books. Illustrated Edition, Special Edition, and Book Club Edition are less popular. We'll be adding these 4 edition types to our new search refinements.
• 30% of respondents said they've searched for a book signed by an author; 4% have searched for a book signed by author and illustrator, and 1% for those signed by the illustrator. No respondents said they've searched for a book signed by the publisher.
• 92% of buyers said they would use price range refinements sometimes or always if these were added.
• Which condition codes are buyers most comfortable with? Buyers are widely split: some prefer to see just New/Used, others prefer a list of seven different codes (new, as new, fine, very good, good, fair, poor), fewer prefer eight codes (new, as new, fine, near fine, very good, good, fair, poor) and others prefer a choice between only three or four codes. We're adding Near Fine to the list of condition codes for booksellers, and will likely test different combinations with buyers before deciding how to display them in search.