Retail book store format in

Abstract

Abstract: The share of book retailing in the entire retail pie is not more than 3% in India. But when we look at the share of the organized vs unorganized retailing in books that is prevalent in India, most of the current book sales share is taken away by the unorganized players. Very few organized players operate across the country in books retail market. The notable ones with national chains include the Landmark Bookstores, Crosswords, Higginbothams etc. The major difference that an organized retail format in bookstores, can offer to its customer is in the form of the service it provides. Since books by themselves are commodities, they do not act as a differentiating factor. With regard to the service aspect of bookstores, the store format plays a major role. Understanding the pulse of the customer while setting up the bookstore will add a lot of meaning to the experience we seek to provide to the customer. It is for this overall experience that most of the customers return back to the store and not just for the books alone. This leads us to believing that understanding the store format of bookstores along with learning what exactly the customer wants as part of his experience in a bookstore, can lead to a successful bookstore. This perhaps could be attributed as the reason for the success of national chains like Crosswords or Landmark. This paper identifies those parameters that are of prime importance to a typical bookstore customer. Based on the identified parameters, a representative model is drawn where these parameters are mapped on to customer satisfaction parameters to understand the impact of the former on the latter. The paper concludes with a recommendation for players who wish to venture into the relatively less explored organized book retailing space, regarding those aspects of the store format on which he has to spend a larger share of his budget. Keywords: Organized bookstore retailing, store format, customer satisfaction.