An online portal for second hand books

Context-

We are a team of three young and passionate people who love to read and feel that there is a larger audience out there who relishes the joy of reading as much as we do. Hence, we thought of creating an online platform for all the book lovers to gain access to all the popular and in-demand books. As per our own experiences and observation we have realized that once we are done reading a book, it is either gifted/given to the friends/family or kept in one corner of the home.Hence we want to provide a solution by offering the buyback option to our customers.

Our starting area- Mumbai

We have planned to begin our operations in Mumbai so that we get the real taste of how the market works, a good understanding of establishing relationships with the vendors, working on cost effective logistics, etc.

Our business model-

The idea is to gain brand visibility and workout on a margin which would deliver us assured fixed returns. So, we want to create our own brand which will be one of the affiliate vendor partners of Flipkart, but our USP is that we will provide the buyback option for the books for which we receive the order from our other customers. In this way we will only buy back a second hand book from our customers once another customer has already placed the order for the same book. The positive side of selling second hand books under the buyback scheme is that we will sell the same book to our customers at the second hand price but every time the cycle gets repeated our profit margin would grow.

Seeking Answers for-

– How to utilize social media and other marketing channels to reach out to our target customers.

– Your ideas/suggestions on maintaining the pool of the old books in the buyback option. In other words, we are planning that we will give our customers the option of listing down the second hand books on our site which they want to sell. Once we have the order for the same book, we will buy it and give it to the customer who asked for it. Does it sound logical or is there a better way to handle it?

– How to optimize the logistics- Any input/suggestion on how to get an optimum logistics deal done keeping in mind the margin in this business is not very high. Should we only opt for the online payment mode? Any suggestions on who could be our ideal logistics partners based on the nature of our business?

– Any further suggestion/guidance/critical points?

Lastly, thank you so much for taking out your precious time to understand what our venture is all about and guiding us with

your valuable inputs/insights.