Selection matters: World of Books branches out to meet customer needs

Dan Mucha, who became c.e.o. of online second-hand books retailer World of Books Group in March 2024, describes it as “the perfect role for me”. Having previously been the owner of a bookshop in Prague “many years ago”, director and general manager of books for Amazon in the UK and a non-executive board member at both Waterstones and Barnes & Noble, as well as holding other e-commerce positions at the likes of Photobox, he says: “I feel like it’s what I’ve been working towards.” Albeit, he adds, without “knowing it for a long time”.

Opportunities of scale

“I love the books business, and I love books,” Mucha tells The Bookseller. “And then on top of that, there are some specifics about the business that I love. I love the sustainability piece that comes with being an e-commerce business. We’re about £200m in revenue. You can do a lot with a business this size. It’s big enough that it has scale and can reach a lot of customers and make a difference, but it’s also small enough that it’s still agile. So all those things put together, I couldn’t resist.”

On visiting the company’s main UK warehouse for the first time, he says: “That’s when I realised the scale was really much, much greater than I expected, and the potential much greater than I had appreciated. When you step into a place like that, it wasn’t quite like an Amazon Fulfilment Centre, which are gigantic, but you definitely get a sense of the scale of it. That was the moment where I thought to myself: ‘Gosh, this is really a big opportunity.’”

Second-hand books is our heritage. It’ll always be what we stand for… the centre of our value proposition.

But despite being impressed by the operation, Mucha identified opportunities for improvement, including in the selection of books available for customers. “We’ve been at this for 20 years, and we still don’t have all the books that customers want. We don’t have a complete selection,” he explains. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Amazon, selection matters. We want customers to come to us frequently, and when they come to us, we also want them to build a basket. And if you’re looking to buy a month’s worth of reading and you want to buy four books, and you only find two or three of them, you’re disappointed. So we still have a lot of work to do on completing our selection.”

Widening offer

He sees the inclusion of new books, alongside the business’ core second-hand offering, as part of the solution. “Second-hand books is our heritage. It’ll always be what we stand for… the centre of our value proposition. Full stop. We have to be reminded, however, that fundamentally, our customers are readers. They come to our website to buy books and the worst experience as a customer is when you come to a website to buy books and they’re not there. The best and fastest way to close that gap is for us to add new books to our value proposition,” he says. “Our goal at the end of the day is to help the reader find the book that she’s looking for, and if we don’t have the selection, then we fail that reader. So a new book is just an additional option to support the customer experience.”

Part of this, he says, is that “over time, we’d like to have relationships with publishers directly for new books”. “We source a lot of our books from individuals and also from charities. Increasingly, we’re starting to source books from publishers as well, to take their end-of-life books off their hands. So we think there’s an opportunity for us to have a much warmer and productive relationship with publishers,” he explains.

He continues: “We’re excited to engage more with the industry. I think we’ve been, probably, in the past, a bit of an island, being focused on second-hand books and based outside of London. But our perspective is that there’s a huge opportunity to improve our customer experience in a way that has us engaged with the industry, with publishers.”

Consistent branding

Another way Mucha is looking to improve the business is to bring everything under the World of Books brand, as “we have a very fragmented set of brands”. On the web, the company is World of Books, but when it sources supply from customers it is currently Ziffit and when it sources supply from charity shops it is Shopiago. “Before the end of this year we will consolidate all those brands under the World of Books brand,” he says, “which is really important to start getting the message out to more customers.”

He describes this new brand positioning as a “huge” opportunity, especially as the company looks to “building out a stronger business in the US”, following the acquisition in 2021 of Sell Back Your Book. “We’re on a journey of bringing it into the World of Books umbrella and improving the product capability there, the website, the supply, proposition, and so forth. So that, in future, we’re a single World of Books brand that operates globally across the two biggest English-language territories.”

Top priorities

Overall, Mucha says the key priorities are to “get the right books on the shelves, the right customer shopping for them, and then moving the books fast enough”. This is what he calls “getting our flywheel to spin faster” while maintaining the focus on sustainability; “getting our population of people really engaged”, as the business has “gone through a lot of transition of leadership and in other ways over the past 12 to 18 months”; expanding from a UK business to a global business, “scaling our employee value proposition across multiple territories, and making this a great place to work”, and “building out a stronger business in the US”; and “getting great in our direct-to-consumer experience again”.

“We think the bigger opportunity for us, and the better opportunity for us, is reaching customers directly through a great website and through an app,” he explains. “We’re going to look quite a bit different in January than we do today.”