Students now have another option when buying and selling textbooks.SwoopThat.com has partnered with major textbook publishers and many online retailers, such as Amazon.com and Half.com, to help provide students with a new way to get their textbooks for a lower price than the bookstore.
Students now have another option when buying and selling textbooks.SwoopThat.com has partnered with major textbook publishers and many online retailers, such as Amazon.com and Half.com, to help provide students with a new way to get their textbooks for a lower price than the bookstore.
Three recent college graduates launched SwoopThat.com in August and September of this year. To make the website a reality, the graduates created all the necessary technology themselves. The website currently supports about 2,500 schools across the country, inclduing 2,100 colleges. The idea for the website came from these graduates’ own experiences finding and buying textbooks, which they found time-consuming and frustrating.
“[We] became frustrated with the high price of textbooks and all the time it took to look for and get these textbooks, so we decided to automate the search so that it can save time,” said SwoopThat.com CEO and founder, Johnny Simkin. “We currently support most of the schools in the country and are always trying to add more schools.”
SwoopThat.com works in a way that is very convenient for college students. The website is updated about a month before the start of school with all the current textbook and course information, which higher education institutions are required to post online under the Higher Education Opportunities Act of 2008 that came into effect in 2010.
The process is completely anonymous, where students type in their courses and see where they can buy the textbooks for each class. The students get a quote and can get the best deals on their textbooks by comparison shopping on the website itself. The student can then buy all of his or her books simultaneously, with one quick checkout.
While SwoopThat.com itself does not process the payments, the retailers can track sales that came from SwoopThat.com itself. There is also a sell textbooks option for students where they can see how much people are offering for their textbooks.
“We make it transparent about how much the student is saving and it goes into the system,” Simkin explained.
In addition, there is a student-to-student textbook exchange feature, through which exchanges can take place on individual campuses. The textbook exchange is shown only among students at each campus. In order to sell at school, the student at the school must specify the price and condition, such as good, poor, or fair, and any student on campus can buy it. The students then set up their own exchange place on campus where they can exchange and sell the textbook.
The website has other features that make it appealing to students. Students can create a fundraising platform by createing a website for books and getting people at their schools to use them, which in turn helps get money to support the website and its cause. The students can also track and see how much money they have earned.
The company has already seen major success.
“It has been phenomenal,” Simkin said. “Last fall we had a $1000 marketing budget, but we were able to help students save half a million dollars.”
Now that the technology is stabilizing, SwoopThat plans to begin using some Facebook apps to help get it off the ground.
“We want to have students do the marketing for us, because you trust what your friends say,” Simkin said. “The idea would be to have friends recommending it to each other.”
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