Websites
A bookshop you own outright
The marketplaces rent you shelf space and take a cut of everything on it. Your own site is the one place a sale is worth full margin, the customer is yours, and nobody changes the rules on you in a quarterly email.
Two ways to launch
Template or bespoke
Both get the whole storefront. The difference is how much of it we design around you, not which features you are allowed.
Octavo Quickstart
Our framework, personalized to your shop and launched quickly. You bring the look you want and the books; we build the layout and then teach you to run it yourself.
Folio Custom
For shops that need a design of their own, custom feature work, or an integration with a new-book supplier. Our design team, or bring your own designer and we will work with them.
Searching a bookshop
Search that knows what a book is
General shop software searches a product name and a description. Yours searches author, title, publisher, place, date, edition, binding, condition and keywords, because that is how someone looks for a book they half remember.
Categories and online catalogs give browsers somewhere to wander, and a customer who lands on a book that has sold gets shown what else is like it rather than a dead end.
Yours to change
Edit the site without ringing us
Pages, text, images, events and the front-page carousel are all yours to edit. Put up a fair announcement on the morning of the fair. Turn on a vacation message before you go rather than emailing support from the airport.
We train you on it at setup and we do not charge for small changes you make yourself, because you making them is the point.
The parts nobody asks about
Infrastructure you should not have to think about
The unglamorous half of running a shop online. It is included, it is maintained, and it is the reason nobody has to call anyone.
Sitemaps and structured data
Sitemaps, rich snippet markup and structured data are generated and kept current, and Google Analytics and Search Console connect in a couple of clicks. Your books get indexed as books.
DNS somebody will help you with
We manage DNS for hundreds of bookseller domains, whether the records live on our servers or somewhere else. A, CNAME, TXT, MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, set up properly so your mail arrives.
Accessibility and GDPR
Platform updates are reviewed for WCAG accessibility, cookie consent is built in, and customer accounts are designed for GDPR. The rules keep moving and keeping up with them is our job.
Why it matters which one sells it
The sale you keep all of
Routing can hold new stock back from the marketplaces for a few days, so it appears on your own site first. The books that sell in that window cost you no commission at all, and the customer who buys them is yours rather than the venue's.
Want to see what yours would look like?
Look through what other booksellers are running, or talk to us about your own shop and we will tell you honestly which of the two builds you need.