Brent Lecompte Blog: Spotlight: BookScouter Offers a Platform for Comparing Book Prices

For college students and others who want to resell books, the process of finding the best price can be time consuming. There are several different platforms available to actually sell those books and textbooks. But to make sure you get the best possible price, there’s BookScouter. Read more about BookScouter and its price comparison tool in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

What BookScouter Does

Offers a price comparison tool for books.

President Dustin Checketts told Small Business Trends, “BookScouter is a price-comparison platform that allows students, book resellers and anyone simply wanting to de-clutter their lives, sell their books for the best possible price with no membership or registration required.”

Business Niche

Comparing rates from plenty of different platforms.

Checketts explains, “BookScouter is known as the most comprehensive book buyback price comparison site and the largest referrer to many of the country’s largest book buyback companies including Amazon.com, Chegg.com, Powells.com, and TextbookRush.com.”

How the Business Got Started

To get the most out of selling back college textbooks.

Checketts explains, “After hearing the inconvenient process that a friend was going through to get the most cash out of their old college textbooks, Brandon Checketts, BookScouter founder and developer, decided to build a working prototype that simplified and expedited the process. Users would simply input their ISBN once and receive quotes from several online book buyback companies, making the decision of who to sell to for the most cash quick and easy.”

Biggest Risk

Growing the business through acquisition.

Checketts explains, “One of the biggest risks we have taken was buying out a competitive website. It was our first attempt at acquiring another website and we didn’t really know what we were doing. We were mostly guessing at the value of the website and quite frankly, the seller could have just taken our money and ran. Ultimately, it worked out fairly well; and although the website has not been a huge revenue source, it has been worthwhile and profitable.”

Lesson Learned

Invest in marketing.

Checketts says, “One thing that we would have done differently would have been to hire a marketing team sooner. The power of word of mouth advertising is incredible and has led the company to great success, but we also found that our marketing investments resulted in great ROI as the company continued to grow.”

How BookScouter Would Spend an Extra $100,000

Building a platform for actually buying and selling books.

Checketts explains, “We would use it to build a business where people could buy and sell their books directly through the BookScouter website. We would write informative blog posts and use the experience and traffic to teach others how make a business out of reselling books and other products.”