Simon Wilcox said: > I don't know any big name web sites that only expect to have one and only > one transaction with a customer. Repeat business is what they want and in > those cases they need to make the process as easy as possible so accounts > are used to retain information between purchases.
The company in question is the Print On Demand (POD) publisher I use to make my perl book available. Most customers to a POD site go there because they know the author (family, friend) and they will only ever buy that one book. Repeat customers, if there are any, could set up an account that has a single password for all their purchases. The POD company has book-buyers sign up with an account. Once the customer has an account, they can buy books, but they can also become an author through the site. The problem is that there are a lot of scam POD companies. And one way to measure how scammy/legitimate they are is to see if their website is about selling books or about getting new authors. So, setting up a book buying customer with all the account information they need to become an author is, well, scammy. There is also a lot of resistance to buyign books online in general. An editor for a commercial publishing house told me the total sales they get through Amazon.com is equal to the sales through 2 Barnes and Noble superstores. Part of that is because people have a touchy-feely relationship to buying books. Part of it is people don't want to deal with credit cards and the ordering process. And part of it is because they don't want to deal with registration and keeping track of yet another password. Getting rid of the password requirement is a minor help to the overhead of making an online purchase compared to walking into a store and paying cash. But getting rid of creating an account to buy one book means that book-buyers are not registered as possible authors for the company. The idea would be to allow one-time buyers to purchase their book without a password. But becoming an author would require setting up an account/password. So, part of the reasoning is technical, part of it is to make purchases easier for one-time buyers, and part of it is to improve the scammy/legitimatey measure of how the POD company does business. I made the suggestion to the company, and right now, all I've gotten is that it is technically impossible to do it. But they have incentive to turn book buyers into authors because they make more money on an author than on a one-time book buyer. So, they don't qualify as completely impartial. So, I wanted to get the technical answer from some folks who have no incentive to put spin on things. And you folks are my impartial expert witnesses. So, first I want to establish if it can be done or not. If it can't, I'll drop the request from the publisher. If it can be done, it's up to them as to whether or not they do it. But in that case, I want it to be clear that they are choosing to do it, not that it is impossible and out of their control. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
