Would you believe me if I told you that few bookstores make money by selling books, or that they don't make money at all?
In marketing, besides advertising, the best-selling of single products is how to display products through a large number of high-quality sales terminals. Simply put, it is to tell consumers why they want to buy (marketing) and how to make consumers experience and buy (sales terminal) quickly and conveniently. In the publishing industry, book sales also depend on a large number of terminal channels (bookstores). But upstream publishers know that on the one hand, all sales channels are asking for promotion policies and author activity resources; On the other hand, the Xinhua Bookstore system, which holds high the website channel of promoting sharp weapons and occupies a convenient geographical position, almost all say that they don't make money.
So where is the profit that should belong to the sales channel system? Or should I say, does anyone really care about the bookstore channel to make money?
1. What is the gross profit of the bookstore?
In the profit distribution system of publishing industry that we have analyzed, bookstores, as sales terminals, have a very large gross profit space from the data point of view. When a publisher delivers goods to a distributor at a discount of 55-60%, the distributor's gross profit is theoretically (sales discount-purchase discount). In this way, for the channel system of physical bookstores, the gross profit space is 20%-30% (the sales price of physical bookstores under the membership system is 20%, and the sales price of non-member systems is 10% or even full price). For the online bookstore system, such gross profit space is 10%-20% (the size of profit space depends on the sales policy of the website to a considerable extent).
Comprehensively evaluate the variety sales difference and sales scale between ground bookstores and online bookstores. We estimate that the annual gross profit level of the bookstore system is about 15%. According to the open-book estimation of the annual book sales of 60 billion, the gross profit of the bookstore system is about 90-10 billion.
For comparison, we exclude the sales share of textbooks, supplementary books and current affairs books (about150-20 billion). After elimination, the total annual sales of popular books is about 40 billion to 45 billion, and the total gross profit is between 6 billion and 7 billion. Because about 60% of the sales of popular books will be concentrated on online channels, online sales will be about 25 billion, gross profit will be about 4 billion, ground channel sales will be 654.38+0.5 billion-20 billion, and gross profit will be about 2-3 billion.
However, from online Dangdang JD.COM Amazon to offline Xinhua Bookstore and private bookstores, have bookstores really made such billions of profits?
Second, how much net profit can a bookstore have?
The net profit of a bookstore depends on the difference between gross profit and cost. Above we estimated the gross profit of the bookstore industry. What are the costs? Simply put, storage and transportation costs and operating costs are two major parts of bookstore costs. Subject to the confidentiality of specific figures, we can only estimate the impact of these costs on bookstore profits from a wide range.
1. Storage cost: store rental cost, storage cost and logistics cost.
Online bookstores and offline bookstores have a common feature: many varieties and many copies. Due to the characteristics of books, no matter what kind of bookstore carrier, the number of book varieties is regarded as an important indicator of bookstore opening. But we must understand that a book can only be profitable if it is sold, and the only thing that can be determined before it is sold is the storage cost. This storage cost here we simply estimate the storage cost of its sales service for offline bookstores and evaluate its logistics cost for online bookstores.
It is difficult to estimate the impact of storage costs on bookstore profits. First of all, the definition of storage cost is difficult to define. For example, the independent storage cost of online bookstore generally refers to the storage cost of books in the warehouse, and it is usually difficult to predict how much hardware transformation cost is invested in this warehouse cost. For offline bookstores, the rental cost of Xinhua Bookstore system is usually close to zero. The cost of private bookstores is relatively high, and even its cost is mainly concentrated on the storage cost of book display. Therefore, we evaluate the storage cost of bookstore system, which can only be defined as the corresponding storage logistics cost generated by maintaining book sales.
Let's assume that the rent of all offline bookstores is zero (regardless of the sales ratio of the venue vendors), so let's first look at what the display standards adopted by different types of offline bookstores are. For example, we can see that the book business area of Beijing Xidan Book Building is10.6 million square meters, and it undertakes the display of 400,000 kinds of books (25 kinds per square meter on average). Guangzhou square's 500-square-meter book business area undertakes the exhibition of 50,000 kinds of books (average per square meter 100), and Suzhou Eslite 15000 square meters book business area undertakes the exhibition of150,000 kinds of books (average per square meter 10).
We assume that the storage cost of 1 square 15 books is calculated at 1 square 100 yuan per year (the exhibition of 15 books is updated quarterly, and 60 books are updated throughout the year, and the storage cost of each book is set to 1.5 yuan). If the efficiency of offline bookstores is 60, the storage cost is estimated to account for about 7% of the total sales (20 15). The retail sales of general books of chain stores in Jiangsu Province is 535 million yuan, the store area is about 330,000 square meters, and the average efficiency of stores is about 1620 yuan. In reality, most physical stores can't achieve such stable sales. In fact, the sales proportion of storage expenses may reach about 10% of the sales of physical bookstores.
Although the storage cost of online bookstores is lower, all websites will face logistics costs: a certain amount of postage policy-for example, the postage price of Amazon and Dangdang is 59 yuan, while that of JD.COM. The postage price of COM is 99 yuan. How much can this cost be? If the average price of a book is 45 yuan, the average online price is around 30 yuan. Then Amazon and Dangdang need to buy two books to meet the delivery conditions, while JD.COM needs three books to deliver. The cost of such 1 express delivery is around 5 yuan in the same city and around 7 yuan across the city. This is equivalent to about 6% of the price in a book.
On the whole, the cost of warehousing and logistics accounts for at least 6%-7% of bookstore sales.
Well, only counting this item, the profit that should belong to the bookstore is nearly half less.
2. Production cost
Most of the operating costs of bookstores are basically concentrated on labor costs and activity costs.
Almost everyone says that bookstores are sunset industries. Although the salary is not high, employees should still be paid. And whether online or offline bookstores, channels always need marketing activities to gather the popularity of consumers. The offline bookstore looks for the author, and the online bookstore does the promotion. Even if the author's food, clothing, housing and transportation are all borne by the publishing house (in fact, many big-name authors will definitely ask the channel providers to bear some or even all of them), even if the online bookstore's activities and promotions are paid by the publishing house, it is always necessary to invest some manpower and material resources in publicity.
The operating costs of each bookstore are confidential. But we can make a rough estimate.
Operating cost of offline bookstore: 100 square meter bookstore, assuming that the display variety reaches 2000. There are about 3 people who need to maintain normal operation (the bookstore always needs to work shifts when it is not resting), and the annual human office cost is about 6,543.8+10,000. Here we have no way to estimate the proportion of labor costs to the total sales of stores. For a central bookstore in a big city, the floor efficiency is usually around 4,000 yuan (the data comes from the data analysis report of stores in Jiangsu Province on 20 15), and the annual sales of 100 square meter is only 400,000, and the labor cost reaches 25%.
Therefore, if we don't consider the support of textbooks and current affairs books, offline bookstores will definitely lose money. The larger the bookstore area, the more varieties displayed, and the higher the labor cost, but the more such a situation, the lower the efficiency.
As for the proportion of online bookstore's operating cost to book sales, we looked up a lot of information, but failed to find an accurate cost figure. This is because Dangdang, Amazon and JD.COM have no operating costs that only serve the book business. Perhaps it can be directly included in the operating costs of online bookstores, with only the corresponding labor costs. But what we can see is why Dangdang changed from books to department stores, because the profit rate of books will not be very high. Why did JD.COM shout out the slogan of not making profits for five years? He is not interested in the profits of the book department. Then we can infer that the online channel of the book board can certainly earn a certain percentage of profits by virtue of the siphon effect of "low price+rich variety". However, the profit after excluding operating costs should not be high.
If offline bookstores only do ordinary books, then non-central cities, non-large bookstores and non-brand bookstores are almost at a loss. Even considering the support of teaching materials and other preferential policies for field rent, the profit of offline bookstores in book sales is extremely meager. Why can Fang, Eslite, Sisyph and Nanjing pioneer bookstore make profits? Perhaps the brand premium, user experience (not pursuing the number of varieties but only the quality products) and the construction of cultural ecological circle are the main sources of its profits.
Online channel reservation module has always been a tool to attract popularity rather than profit. Compared with the prices of other online SKUs, books are almost the cheapest popular products. So no one cares whether the sales of online bookstores are profitable. They only care about how many non-book products each customer can buy on their own network.
Therefore, no one may care about whether the book business in the sales channel is profitable, but for the participants in the publishing industry, when the sales terminal does not care about book sales, it just turns book sales into a tool to build its own brand. As an upstream publishing house, how can we break the shackles of this sales?