Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

If you ask some of the most vocal critics of college bookstores on campus, they might claim they can't name one good reason to shop at your store. Now thanks to Middlebury College, you can give them seven.

Black Friday is traditionally the biggest day of the year for the bulk of the retail world. Although your store actually has its big day at some point in the late summer or early fall, there's no reason you can't get in on the day-after-Thanksgiving action.

The college textbook industry is kind of like the weirdest cookie jar in history.

If you’re on Snapchat, have you seen a lot of geofilters popping up on people’s stories? You know, those little graphical overlays that feature an illustration of a location or event at which the photo was taken and uploaded?

"If you build it, [they] will come."

Rush is upon us. You’re making sure inventory is accounted for, stocking shelves, scheduling employees for peak hours and putting out the best and brightest new items on prominent display. It’s usually hectic and stressful, but you have your method down to make things roll as smoothly as possible.

Foreword Online is proud of its long history of helping stores promote themselves to succeed and help students save. That said, social media can really change a lot in a short amount of time. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter redesign their users' profiles, adjust their algorithms to make it harder for businesses to reach prospective customers without paying for advertising and even do some seemingly minor things that can really change the way a business promotes itself, like change the optimized size of their profile images.

With our roots running deep in the textbook business, MBS strives to make life in the hectic world of college retail easier for its partner stores. That goal was a guiding principle behind Arc, our latest innovation that puts all of your retail management tools in one single-portal access point. In this video, see what UCM Store Director Charlie Rutt had to say about the time savings and flexibility Arc will present for his store.

Whether they like it or not, students are most likely going to need their textbooks if they want to be as successful as possible in their pursuit of higher education. But with the costs of both tuition and course materials rising exponentially above the rate of inflation, are students able to afford to be successful? According to figures from the United States Department of Labor and CollegeBoard.org, from 1986 to 2014, overall inflation rose by 115%, but tuition and fees increased by 365% and college textbooks have gone up by 82% in just the last 10 years.

Like many stores, the Randolph-Macon Campus Store had a loyalty program. Students earned points on applicable purchases, which they could use to go online within a year of earning the points to create an order for gift cards, in $5 increments. The store would then create the gift certificate in-store on its POS, which they'd either mail to students or send the students an email letting them to know they could pick it up themselves. Those gift cards also had a one-year shelf life before expiring.