Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

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.

Whether they know it or not, the faculty members at your school play a crucial role in the success of your business. By implementing a few savvy strategies, you can encourage helpful feedback, establish a routine of prompt adoptions and inspire devoted on-campus ambassadors.

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.

Incentivizing students to participate in your buyback can often be a tricky thing. Maybe they think they can get a better deal elsewhere. Maybe they’re planning on giving their books to a friend. Maybe they assume their books are worth so little that it’s not even worth stopping by the buyback counter. Finding ways to appeal to them can be hard with all these forces outside of a store’s control, especially since most stores are dependent on a robust buyback in order to make sure their shelves are stocked with the right titles the following term.

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.

When the Flyer Spirit Store at the University of Dayton decided it was time to open up a new space, they didn’t have to look far.

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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.

Have you ever thought about what you'd include in your store if you could buy and install whatever you'd like? Maybe you'd start with a security upgrade, or perhaps you'd want a brand new POS - it's up to you! If you haven't, check out this list and see if there's anything you might want to add to that wish list of yours. Check out our list.