These tools are aimed at helping you analyze your stock to help ensure that all those books on your shelves are working for you and your customers, rather than simply taking up valuable space. Analytics is a somewhat unique collaborative analysis tool, in that you’ll be able to see an aggregated list of bestselling titles, most ordered not-yet-published titles, and more, from your Analytics-using colleagues. While it’s true that each and every bookstore and community has its own unique personality and quirks, it’s also true that bookshops tend to purchase their books from the same pool of available titles, and oftentimes readers hear about those books from the same places, more now than ever, unfortunately. Your data is anonymous in Analytics for other users, and is simply added to the aggregated data.
We consider Edelweiss Analytics to be a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive tool. We’ll show you what’s going on, but we don’t tell you what to do, so to speak. You know the needs of your community better than anyone, but making those decisions with as much information as possible can only be a helpful thing. The idea is to allow for smarter inventory management, and to allow the measurement of these activities. Truly, if you’re not able to measure or track an activity, you’re less able to fix any problems or, frankly, to even know if a problem exists.