In the coming weeks, our webstore will be getting an updated look! For those of you who like the way it is presently (or simply fear change) fear not. The current store will still be available for use for the foreseeable future, even after the new site launches. The new version, however, should not only be much more user friendly for tablet and mobile users, but also provide us some great tools to help customers who use the online shop to find what the seek more easily. We expect there to be no issues with the changeover, but we will certainly let you know if anything changes.
We should, at this point, both thank and acknowledge the lovely people at Bookmanager. For those who are not aware, Bookmanager is the program that runs all our sales and inventory information. Any time that you have visited us and wondered if we have a book only for us to type a few letters and make it appear, or been surprised minutes after an online order has been placed that we already have it ready to go, that’s Bookmanager. It is also Bookmanager that allows you to easily buy audiobook versions by connecting us with Libro.fm , or shows us that the last independent bookshop available version of the book you seek is in British Columbia, or Kansas, or elsewhere.
As well as being a Canadian company, they are, like us a multigenerational family business. They do not get enough recognition outside of our industry, and they have really done more than just about any single entity to make Canadian bookselling work over the last 20 months. While also helping us manage our webstore, to which we were thrilled to be able to have available for your use they put in countless hours helping other shops get online (in some cases, by first getting their inventory into a computer at all) during lockdown, and have allowed so many of us to keep the lights on while the doors were closed.
A huge thank you to Michael Neill, Trevor, the myriad support staff we speak to weekly who help us fix what we have broken, and all the others who make Bookmanager run. We certainly could not run without them.