Us Against The World

“In A Bind” is an interactive site that searches the web for the cheapest prices on your textbooks based on the information that you give it about your classes. Once you've picked everything you need, you can purchase or rent the books and we'll ship them right to your doorstep.
Where Do I Begin?

When I came up with the idea of creating a textbook selling website, I immediately thought of my competition. I wanted to make my company something that people had never seen before but I realized that with sites like Amazon and Chegg, that would be impossible. So instead, I decided to figure out what exactly they were missing and what were some of the complaints that people had with these services. After a little bit of research on both of these sites as well as on some online forums where you can comment on the different services you've used, I realized what I needed to do in order to make this company stand out. So how do we compare to these other services? Well . . . .

Amazon.com
URL: Amazon Link

Amazon.com is definitely one of my top competitors. They're known for their low prices and their ability to get books to you in a small amount of time. One of their features that I also found to be really helpful would be their discounts for college students. They have a deal where you can get a certain percentage off of your textbook purchase if you use your school email address. Even though they have all of these great features there are some flaws. The first would be when you buy a book from amazon but it's technically from a 3rd party, they cannot guarantee that your book will get to you in a timely fashion. I've actually had experience with this. I ordered a programming book from an outside party in last month and it was supposed to be here within 3 to 5 days. It's now February and I still haven't received it or a refund. One thing I want to do to prevent this from happening is make sure that I keep a close eye on the third parties that we work with to make sure that they don't just take the money and never send our customers the product. I would also put a cap on the amount of time that a seller has to get back to the customer. I would probably give them 2 or 3 business days after they receive payment to either ship out their product or contact us so that we can keep our customer in the loop throughout the process.

Chegg.com
URL: Chegg Link

Chegg is one of my main competitors for 3 important reasons:

1. They also allow you to look up courses at the university that you're attending and find reviews and information about the class.
2. They have a social media type of network aspect that comes with your account that you create on the website
3. They have really impressive study tools attached to the website like a flashcard app and online tutoring

Now, even though all of these ideas are really cool and would definitely appeal to college students, there is a tiny problem with each of them. I like that they let you look up your courses and see what other students that have taken the course say about it, but it doesn't tell you what textbooks you need for each specific course. This part of the site is also maintained by the people who have accounts with the site. So, if no one takes the time to add the information, then you won't find any. Their homework help aspect is also a good idea but it doesn't guarantee that your questions will get answered. Not to mention, the help that you're getting is not from trained educators who know a lot about the field. The information comes from other students and members of the website; so there's no guarantee that the information is accurate. I do think that the social media aspect of the site is one aspect that could definitely give "In A Bind" a run for its money, but who's to say that we can't incorporate that as well. We would just need to figure out how to make it so that it's not just another account that people have to maintain.

All in all, both of these sites do have really good services. It would definitely be a challenge to make sure that not only do we provide innovative services for people that guarantees quality products but we also have to make sure that we don't become just another textbook site. That's where looking at our competitors will benefit us. We can see what they need to improve and let that inspire us to improve ourselves.