Online Retailer Launches New Product Initiative To Let Customers Search Books Online

Feature Drives Nine percent Increase in Sales

Challenge

Industry leaders stay one step ahead of the competition. For one major online retailer, that means continually finding ways to reaffirm its reputation as the most innovative retail store on the Internet.

Facing renewed competition from booksellers with brick and mortar stores where customers could actually browse, the online bookstore struck back by launching a feature that allowed customers to view selected parts of a book online. Two years later, the retailer introduced the logical next step to enable registered customers to browse for specific phrases or topics of interest in more than 200,000 books.

Both features offset one of the advantages held by the retailer's competitors with brick and mortar branches - letting the customer read the contents of a book before they make a purchase. Just as important, the two technology initiatives helped the company solidify its standing as a groundbreaking online retailer.

At the same time, the company did not want to invest in the resources required to convert those books into digital images...