There’s a new kids bookshop online

By L.C. WONG

MOVE over, Amazon and Borders. There’s a new online bookshop and it’s all Malaysian, produced and managed by one woman.

While most women who want to work from home try freelance work or sales, Quah Kim Lan decided to open a children’s bookshop online.

A big ambition considering it would pit her against the big boys such as Amazon, Borders and even MPH.

Quah’s five-year-old son Foo XianWei was her inspiration when she first started her e-commerce company last year.

No longer wanting to leave XianWei with the babysitter, Quah tried doing the next best thing that would allow her to spend more time with her son. However, after several failed attempts at finding a flexible or part-time job, Quah decided that the only way she could be a home-based mother and yet earn a decent income was by setting up her own Internet business.

“I wanted a completely home-based business and IT was the only option. I could set up a business without having a physical shop and that was appealing (to me),” Quah says.

It wasn’t an easy task though. Being new to computers and the Internet, Quah had to go through months of hard work and sleepless nights. With just enough grit and determination, last June she launched her online bookshop catering for young readers, called 1ChildrenBooks.com (www.1childrenbooks.com). Her company is called Little Bookworms.

Getting started
The months before the launch of 1ChildrenBooks.com were intensely stressful for the 38-year-old mother. Not only did she have to learn the nuts and bolts of Internet programming from scratch, she also had her hands full trying to understand the concept of an online business.

To help her, the qualified accountant decided to attend an e-business course to learn the fundamentals of running an e-commerce business.

By June last year, Quah was told that as part of the course requirement, she had to establish a web-based company which was ready for business.

Thrown into the deep end, she found herself without a clue as to what kind of business to start. “During the course I didn’t have any products in mind, while some of my coursemates already had their own businesses,” she says.

After weeks of intense brainstorming, inspired by her son XianWei, Quah decided that she would create an online children’s bookshop.

Once the idea was in place, it was time for Quah to put together the products and get the website in order.

It was then that Quah encountered her first stumbling block.

Getting book publishers on board to deal directly with 1ChildrenBooks.com, Quah says, was one of the most difficult hurdles. “Many international publishers had exclusive arrangements with big bookshops like MPH, and that made it harder for them to deal with 1ChildrenBooks.com,” she explains.

Having not received any response from publishers, Quah was on the brink of throwing in the towel. That’s when the Penguin Group agreed to work with her.

Line 837
For a while it seemed that Quah was up to a good start but she had to overcome yet another stumbling block as she strove to add more features to her website.

“I was told by the webhosting company that my online order form could not accommodate my updated review packs because I was only able to update my products list once a month,” Quah says.

She couldn’t afford to pay the webhosting company to fix the problem. Determined to carry on, Quah took matters into her own hands and decided to vet through the HTML codes of the order form, line by line.

“I asked the company for the coding of the order form, and printed out 100 pages of code. I figured since I was not doing the coding from scratch and only adding one item, it couldn’t be that difficult.”

Her first try at slotting the extra review pack into the lines of code failed.

“I submitted the code to the company for them to upload and when it finally did load, the system generated an error message, “pass error on line 837.”

Distraught and confused, Quah consulted the programmers at the company on how she could fix the problem. They advised her to purchase a program that would automatically locate the errors.

Not having any funds to spare, Quah decided to go back and count through the hundreds of lines of code on her 100-page printout until she located the troublesome 837th line and corrected it.

All the hard work paid off as the final upload proved successful, and the item Quah wanted so badly to include finally showed up in order.

“My heart was pounding as I waited for the page to display. When it did, I realised that I not only needed to include the relevant code. I also had to remove some other lines of code,” says Quah.

Little bookworms
Knowing that competition would be tough with big boys like MPH covering the local region and e-commerce darlings Amazon providing its products for the global market, Quah realised that she had to come up with something different for her company to survive.

Instead of selling as many books as she could, Quah decided that her selling point would be to provide book reviews from a mother’s perspective and then package the books according to age group.

“I have given a lot of details and general descriptions because I know (parents) don’t have the luxury of flipping through books,” Quah says.

“For each book I scan the cover and the inside pages just to give parents a feel of (the book),” she adds.

Although Quah is currently doing all the work herself, she encourages other parents to review books for her website.

She is currently looking for partners. Quah had initially approached friends about partnering, but many were not certain about the business model.

Quah has to be selective of the books she buys given her limited financial resources. A careful selection process and a quick reference to Amazon’s book ranking helps her to decide which books to include on her website.

“I only buy popular and bestselling titles,” Quah explains. According to her, each package could contain up to five books and prices are said to be competitive with the local prices.

“Whenever possible, books of different formats and interests are put together to make the pack as wholesome as possible.”

Her site currently only offers Penguin books. This includes Dorling Kindersley, Puffin and Ladybird titles.

1ChildrenBooks.com accepts payment in credit card (Visa and Mastercard). The company which was conducting the e-business course that Quah went for also provided a payment engine and webhosting for her site.

Moving on
Quah admits that the response to her website is still not what she had hoped for and the company has yet to get out of the red.

So far, she has received orders mainly from Singapore and Malaysia although her website covers a range of countries including Norway and Brazil. During the e-commerce course she attended, Quah was advised against limiting her business to local customers.

She is hoping to do some marketing but given her limited financial resources Quah is currently unable to do so. She has, however, managed to get her site listed on some search engines.

“At the e-business course I attended, I was told that if I get my page on the front pages of search engines, I would be able to get sales. But in reality, it’s not as easy as that.”

Behind her all the way is her supportive husband who contributed his ideas when it came to the site’s design.

Quah is determined to keep her business alive. At this point in time she is on the lookout for a part-time job to support the business in the hope that all her efforts will bear fruit in the future.

“I’m giving myself two years to see if my business will flourish and if I can create a niche market by then,” she says.

Even if 1ChildrenBooks.com doesn’t reach the heights she hopes for, Quah takes heart knowing that she has already accomplished her very first objective – which was to spend time at home doting on her son.