Building a Bookshop to Help Indies Compete with Amazon

After successfully launching LitHub, Electric Literature, and Catapult, Andy Hunter set his sights on helping independent bookstores compete online. The ambitious project would rely on Ingram, the largest book distributor in the US, as a fulfillment partner, and a custom eCommerce experience that included robust affiliate tracking. Indie bookstores could create their own storefront, tailor book lists, and promote the shop to customers at no cost, while receiving generous affiliate payments for books they sold through the portal.

The vision was clear from the outset, and much of my own involvement was supporting the early fundraising efforts with an initial deck, then in competitive research and technical planning for the v1 of the platform, as well as overseeing branding and design. I turned over day-to-day management of the project not long after initial research and designs were completed and engineering was well under way. It would be several more months before Bookshop would launch, in early 2020. Some insight into the technical implementation can be found on Medium .

Bookshop has become a much larger success than expected due to COVID-19, with bookstores around the US using the site as a lifeline as their physical doors were shuttered.