When the founders of the online used bookstore World of Books started the company in 2002, they combined a love of books with a commitment to sustainability. Through their remarkable circular economy model, they acquire inventory through customer buy-back programs and by purchasing excess stock from charities, reducing waste and supporting charitable organizations. To date, the company has rehomed over 100 million books and has 10 million books in inventory and customers across 190 countries. A certified B Corporation since 2019, World of Books has earned two Queen's Awards for Sustainable Development and International Trade and is officially carbon neutral, aiming for Net Zero by 2050.
After starting in the UK and eventually dominating the used books market there, World of Books began gradually expanding into the United States. The company recognized that entering this large book market—which is around eight times the size of the book market in the UK—would be relatively straightforward due to minimal cultural and language barriers. In 2022, World of Books acquired a significant competitor based near Chicago, which dramatically accelerated their expansion, more than tripling their international sales overnight.
This rapid growth presented World of Books with a new set of challenges: not only did they need to manage their UK and US operations as separate entities, but they also required an e-commerce platform capable of handling enterprise-level complexity. The platform needed to support their burgeoning operations across all channels, which were projected to reach around $200 million in sales for the year, with direct-to-consumer growth exceeding 25% year-over-year. The company now faced the task of integrating these operations while maintaining a quality customer experience and increasing conversions across both markets.
This led them to approach Shopify to explore whether the platform could better support their international growth and operational needs. After careful consideration, World of Books decided to move their operations to Shopify and leverage Shopify Payments' multi-entity management capabilities. Since then, World of Books has seen:
- 10% increase in conversion rates compared to their legacy system
- 18% increase in conversion rates during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) period
- Seven all-time sales volume records achieved in days immediately before, during, and after BFCM
- Avoided increased headcount, legal expenses, 3-4 months of work, and 10s of thousands of pounds in fees and foreign exchange risk
The Challenge: Managing multiple entities while maintaining customer experience and increasing conversions
As World of Books looked to effectively manage their UK and US operations as separate legal entities to comply with taxes and regulations and save on costs, they were intent on two key outcomes: keeping their customer experience as engaging as possible and increasing conversions.
"Really what we were desperately hoping for in replatforming to Shopify was to take advantage of Shop Pay as an accelerated wallet," says David Magee, product director at World of Books. "We thought that would deliver a really engaging customer experience and that it would yield good returns from a conversion rate perspective. Our enthusiasm for Shop Pay and the need to be able to implement Shop Pay across two separate entities gave rise to the conversation that we had with Shopify."
David was also looking to manage complex inventory and pricing across multiple markets and currencies. In addition to pricing differently across various markets, World of Books reprices around 50% of their approximately 10 million items in inventory daily to take into account market and competitor dynamics and their own available supply.
"The ability to execute on our very intense repricing is just super important, and it's only going to increase in complexity over time," David says. "We had historic custom legacy implementations that were pretty unreliable."
The Solution: Streamlining purchasing while simplifying complex operations across markets
With hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to World of Books each day, David and his team gathered more than enough data to compare the impact of replatforming to Shopify, noting its significant impact on both customer experience and conversion rates.
"Shopify was a clear winner for us in terms of the overall customer experience, with advantages the customers can see by using Shop and Shop Pay. I think it's a much more seamless purchase experience," David says.
Beyond the boost in sales revenue that Shopify Payments achieved for World of Books, the company also saved significantly on headcount and resources. "You're probably talking three to four months-worth of work and tens of thousands of pounds-worth of fees associated with making sure that everything was in place." David says.
David adds that Multi-Entity management also made it easier to manage multiple currencies without losing money on foreign exchange rates or incurring legal risk. "By ensuring that we had the right currencies allocated to the right entities and the right bank accounts underneath each one of those entities, Multi-Entity management reduced our overall foreign exchange currency risk. We would have had to move an awful lot of foreign currency around if we didn't have Shopify Payments' integrated currency and entity management."
World of Books also found that Multi-Entity management helped them more efficiently manage their inventory. "We actually now have much better inventory availability. We are able to more quickly and more accurately present new inventory to customers and update that inventory, whether that's product data or pricing," David says.
The interoperability of Shopify also helped streamline the replatforming process, particularly as David's team consolidated product and catalog data across the UK and US and fed that information into Shopify. They also built custom pricing platforms that integrate seamlessly with Multi-Entity management.
"Volume repricing frequency is a source of competitive advantage to us," David says. "Shopify's ability to scale with us has been really important."
Throughout the implementation of Multi-Entity management, David says that he appreciated the Shopify team's collaborative spirit in welcoming their feedback and ideas for evolving the product. "We felt to some extent like we were part of the product team," he says.
The Results: Building a scalable infrastructure for international expansion
In order to quantify the business impact of replatforming to Shopify with Shopify Payments, David set up an A/B test where 50% of customers were sent to the World of Books legacy site and the other half shopped on the new Shopify-enabled site. This setup allowed him to see the clear benefit of adopting the feature.
"We saw on average a 10% conversion rate increase overall on Shopify relative to the legacy tech stack," David says.
These results bode well for leveraging Shopify's unified commerce solutions as World of Books expands to additional regions. Today the US and Australia are the company's largest markets, but the brand is also reaching regions like Germany, France, and Switzerland.
"By streamlining our backend processes, Multi-Entity management with Shopify Payments really unlocks international expansion for us," David says. "We're a private equity portfolio company with ambitious growth plans. If we were to consider expanding further into other markets through acquisition, where other entities may become involved as part of our group of companies, having the infrastructure in place on the direct-to-consumer channel that could enable that is really powerful for us."
David says that he'd recommend Shopify Payments for merchants of various sizes, from small to large complex enterprises. "It's not only really important for us, but it's I think clearly going to be super important for lots of other merchants in a similar position" he says.
Early in our engagement with Shopify, we very much thought of it as maybe a small to medium enterprise platform. But when you think about the scale that we have—hundreds of thousands of sessions, 10 million products, 5 million repricing events per day, and moving inventory from a number of different warehouses transatlantically—that all happens just fine with Shopify. That was a great learning for us as we invested more time in talking to Shopify and understood that the platform was a much better fit for a very complex enterprise business than we had expected.