Chrislands.com
On April 9, AbeBooks announced the purchase of a company called Chrislands. Some of you will be familiar with Chrislands - they build, host and maintain online bookstores. Chrislands will continue to operate as an independent business - just as BookFinder.com has done since its acquisition by AbeBooks in 2005. Chrislands co-founders Lance Christen and Jaymes Sorbel will remain at the helm and will receive access to AbeBooks’ resources. You can review the full press release here.

Launch of AbeBooks.it
We are very excited to announce that our Italian language site, AbeBooks.it, launched on April 2! All of your books are automatically listed on AbeBooks.it and orders have already started coming in!

New Search Refinement Beta
Be sure to check out the beta version of our new search refinement, available through the Advanced Search page. This search refinement allows buyers to sort results by lowest price + shipping, something both buyers and sellers have been asking for. This is an addition to - and will not replace - any existing refinements. It will be beta tested extensively before launch.

Beta Release of HomeBase 3.0 Coming Soon
Alpha testing of HomeBase 3.0 has been underway since March 10. We have been gathering feedback from the alpha testers and Beta testing will begin this month! If you are interested in Beta testing HomeBase 3.0, please take our survey.

Upcoming Pricing Changes
A Bookseller Bulletin announcing upcoming changes to our fee structure was sent out to all AbeBooks booksellers on April 2. These changes will take effect on April 28.

You can view the full message here.

If you have any questions, please check the 'Ask AbeBooks – Responses' folder of the Bookseller Forum; many questions have already been asked and answered. You can also post a new question here, or contact Customer Support and we will be glad to help.

US & Canadian Shipping Solutions
We've teamed up with Pitney Bowes IMEX and Best Manifesting to make shipping discounts available to our booksellers in the US and Canada. As we track the success of these programs, we're also looking to add more programs and options to more of our booksellers worldwide. Review the shipping solutions.

Customer Support Tip

Shipping Matrix: Lowering Extra Item Shipping Rate to Encourage Multi-Item Orders
by Cheryl
A great way to boost online sales is to lower your extra item shipping rate. Doing so can encourage buyers to purchase more than one book in order to save on shipping costs. Your extra item rate can be easily adjusted through your Shipping Matrix.

Click here for the instructions.

AbeBooks Affiliate Program
As of May 1st, we will be moving our Affiliate Program from the Commission Junction network to the DoubleClick Performics network. Our affiliate program makes up a significant part of our traffic and sales, and we felt that program development would be best served by the move. DoubleClick Performics, as many of you are aware, was recently purchased by Google, and we believe this will only benefit our affiliates in terms of tools and technology.

To ensure a smooth transition for our affiliate partners, we encourage you to migrate all links and banners to the DoubleClick Performics network starting May 1st, 2008. For any booksellers who have their own site and would like to sign up, please join our Performics program starting May 1st. For information on the migration, or general information about the affiliate program, please see our affiliate information page.

More detailed information can also be found in the Forum post by Patrick Armstrong, our Affiliate Manager, located here.

Upcoming Book Fairs
We’re looking forward to meeting many of you at the LA Times Festival of Books in April later this month.

The LA Times Festival of Books, Los Angeles, California, April 26-27. We’ll be in Booth #654.

Most Expensive Books Sold on AbeBooks in March

See the most expensive sales of March.