Ideas, information and industry news for collegiate retailers

For most retailers, the busiest time of the year is approaching. The carols start playing, holiday decorations appear — if they haven’t already been up since August — and managers nationwide start hiring seasonal help to accommodate increased crowd volume and extended hours.  

As a college store leader, you face an entirely different set of challenges.

Once students return to class from Thanksgiving, the countdown is on for the extended holiday break. Lasting anywhere from two weeks to more than a month, students are counting the days until they have time away from the books.

Extending hours during home football games, offering secret sales, participating in on-campus events — the staff of The Ichabod Shop at Washburn University are always looking for new ways to make sure their store is an asset to the students and community they serve. This year, they added a promotion designed to address two common concerns for many students: how to save money on course materials and still receive them before the start of classes.

Young web users tend not to waste words when a good GIF or meme will do. Brands should be careful not to overdo it and avoid sounding like they're trying too hard to seem cool, but they can be a good way for your store to make a quick, fun post or announcement on your website or social media.

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.

The Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Cougar Store is using social media to not only increase sales, but to also serve as the social hub of the university. Serving students as more than a retail outlet, building engagement through social channels is smart business.

Rush is over, finals and buyback are ahead — October is the sweet spot between two of your busiest times during the term. That makes this the perfect opportunity to plan a fun, fall-themed in-store event. Here's your chance to increase sales for your store with inspiration from some of our favorite Foreword Online features. 

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

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.

Today’s textbook market is more competitive. College stores now competes with thousands of online sellers, from Amazon to individual sellers. This gives the student shopper hundreds — if not thousands — of options for acquiring their course materials, as well as the means to easily compare prices. One way for stores to compete is by augmenting their traditionally-obtained inventory with sourcing through the marketplace. To learn more about how new avenues of sourcing can benefit your store, check out this Q&A from President of MBS Textbook Exchange LLC David Henderson.