Businesswoman fulfills recycling dream with online shop for books
Print Edition
Wei Ying, 31, is a picky shopper who always buys new clothes with money from selling her used clothes.
In May, she founded Deja Vu, an online shop that specializes in used books.
It operates in a two-storey flat in north Beijing that is filled with piles of books. Its staff seek to fill orders by finding books from the bookshelves, while others keep the books clean with the use of cloths, erasers and alcohol.
New book arrivals often sell out within a couple of hours.
“My recycling dream is realized,” says Wei, noting that Deja Vu is in demand as more Chinese buy and trade used books because they have limited space at home.
Since Deja Vu’s inception, more than 50,000 people have registered with the online shop, including 10,000 members who are active traders.
Deja Vu serves 10 major cities and will expand across China by the end of the month.
Although bricks-and-mortar bookstores have been making a comeback since 2014, sales at Chinese online bookstores rose 30 percent between January and June this year, while their bricks-and-mortar rivals suffered losses, said a report by Openbook.com, which is based in Beijing.
On the Douban ratings and review website, a club for book lovers has about 350,000 members. They discuss and recommend the books they read and talk about how to swap or trade their used “treasures.”
Online posts such as “200 yuan for 10 used books, Beijing only” and “Used books, good bargain, freight” are common in the online discussions.
“We bookworms are reluctant to throw books away. Due to limited space, I have to give some away, but I would like to find other book lovers to trade with,” says Wang Hongfei, a researcher at Beijing Normal University.
Like many book owners, Wang once carried around a suitcase of books in search of buyers.
However, Deja Vu has made the buying and selling of books easy with just a few clicks on a smartphone. Vendors need only to scan the barcode of books to get the resale price, then wait for the courier to collect them.
Unlike other major book trading platforms, Deja Vu offers standard verification, pricing and packaging. When someone places an order, the vendor is notified and can collect the money online.
Wei was inspired by the BOOKOFF, Japan’s largest offline second-hand bookstore chain. Books are bought for between 10 and 30 percent of the fixed price, and a store can sell 1,000 books a day and take in 1,000 books.
“More users are telling us that they hope to find rare books on our platform, so we’ve extended the range,” says Wei.
However, Deja Vu will not deal in counterfeit or dodgy books.
The Chinese started trading books online a couple of years ago, but Wei says book owners could not communicate directly with one another. So she wants to use Deja Vu to service the needs of this community.
“We should build a music festival rather than a railway station. In a railway station, nobody wants to talk with strangers, but people talk more easily when they share similar music tastes,” she says.
Wei also wants to trade more products such as used electronics and furniture on Deja Vu. “It’s worthwhile when more quality second-hand goods are used by more people.”
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