Our Shelf Report is a new in-depth and personalized reporting feature provided semi-annually.

This report will provide you with an objective assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your bookstore’s inventory, identify specific areas to focus on, and enable you to track improvement over time. The audience for this report is just you and your bookstore– no one else sees this information. 

The report will arrive as a link to an interactive app that you can, if you wish, print as a PDF. You’ll be able to view previous reports, manage your recipients, and more.

The idea behind the Shelf Report is to provide a comprehensive look at your inventory from the macro, market level all the way down to pinpointing individual titles. Since we’re comparing inventory performance across the market place, this report uses industry-wide genre specifications, which are added to each title by the publishers. While each store has their own unique categories, the book industry itself has a more consistent and universal classification system.  Segmenting by industry genre allows us to set realistic benchmarks for you to focus on, rather than comparing the performance of a genre like Art / Architecture to Comics & Graphic Novels, which is the more traditional approach… simply because no other tool really exists to see these market-wide performance benchmarks. You don’t have to do anything on your end to send us genre classification data.

This report measures your book inventory only.

Each category is ‘graded’ according to 4 different measurements:

• Freshness: Using the Edelweiss Analytics Shelf Days analysis, an overall measure of the % of your own inventory that is selling well, or not.
• Relevance: Do you stock titles that are selling well around the market?
• Hit Rate: Measuring buyer-effectiveness, this measure shows whether or not newly published titles that you stocked were ever sold.
• Turnover: How many times per year the average title sold, a good overall measure for how hard your inventory is working for you.

We have identified and implemented these four measures that, together, represent a solid approximation of a very healthy inventory. Basically, managing towards the optimization of these four measures helps lead to a healthy inventory and a healthy inventory is a profitable inventory.

Helpfully, the Shelf Report’s format allows you to track performance over time and provides a consistent way to communicate goals, issues, and victories with managers and investors, as well as buyers and other staff members.