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Bookshop.org

Online bookstore championing independent local bookshops

21-100 employees

B2C
Retail
B2B
Marketplace
Entertainment
Community
eCommerce

Williamsburg, NY

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Company mission

To help local, independent bookstores thrive in the age of ecommerce.

B Corporation

45% female employees

68% employee growth in 12 months

Trustpilot (4.9)

Our take

Bookshop.org, a public benefit corporation, was launched in January 2020 with a mission to encourage people to stop buying books from Amazon and start supporting local bookstores. As more people turn to online stores to purchase books, the founders of Bookshop.org wanted to improve the buying experience, whilst helping local independent businesses to get online as effortlessly as possible. The concept is simple: bookshops create their own online profile, and then earn 30% of any sales that come via their links on social media, newsletters and website. Bookshop.org then handles all the logistics and fulfilment, whilst giving away 75% of all profits to stores, publications, and authors.

Bookshop.org's play is interesting. It doesn’t expect to beat the e-commerce behemoth – only to help its competitors survive. The website already has thousands of retailers signed up and over $20 million has already been distributed to independent bookstores in the United States and United Kingdom.

The online books market is worth over $17b annually, so there remains plenty of opportunity for Bookshop.org to grow. Many of the 3,500 independent bookshops in the US and UK remain without an e-commerce function. The question, however, is how effective Bookshop.org can be at selling to their customers, without cannibalising brick and mortar sales – the bread and butter of this beleaguered industry.