I met the owners of CameraBooks.com when I purchased a book from them, via a few books they sold me through their Amazon partnership. Their service was fast and the books came in fantastic shape. So of course, I had to check out their business site and that's when I decided to interview them. Enjoy...

How did you get into selling resources for cameras?

Alyice, it literally evolved. The business started in 1989 when I was a professional photographer shooting for Boating Magazines. A couple years later we, my husband Ken and I, bought a small camera collection and realized the buying/selling of used and collectable cameras would be not just fun, but also very profitable.

After years of attending countless camera shows-one year we did 65 shows alone-we were looking for something we could do from home and travel less. We had the opportunity to buy a small camera reference book business about 9 years ago which included only 225 new titles and took it. Today we carry over 2,500 new titles of camera reference books, Photographic How-to and Tutorial DVDs. Plus several 1,000 used books, all photography related of course and about 7,000 original camera instruction manuals, from the late 1800s to current.

What was your biggest struggle finding customers when you first started out? How did you overcome that struggle?

In the beginning we sold the majority of our books still at camera shows; however, our goal was to push the business online and be the largest camera reference book business worldwide. I believe I can see we achieved that today.

We never considered a retail store since this is very much a niche business and we were thinking more global than local.

With the purchase of the business we obtained a website, but after a good look decided to drop that site since we weren't able to change product pages ourselves and it offered no secure checkout.

Locally, we found a webmaster with a brand-new software which gave us total flexibility and secured online checkout. (That, of course, was numerous years ago and online purchases were still a pretty novel idea.) Our webmaster helped to get us listed in the search engines and luckily it didn't take a lot to come up high in the search results. Within a few days we had our first orders-from Japan & Brazil, no less!

The struggle was to add more products to the website, buy more book titles and still attend the camera shows. Within one year, from the purchase of the business, we were up to 600 titles. We looked and still look all over the world for camera reference books and import them ourselves. However, now we are so well known that authors approach us and we are Distributors for several.

Being self-employed does require some discipline: you must sit down and work and not goof off. We worked and still work 7 days a week, but more importantly, we have FUN and are pretty good at what we are doing. In our business it is very important to have knowledge about the cameras and photography.

What do you do about repeat business?

Repeat business is very important. No doubt the online business changed to being much more competitive, but on the other side, millions of people (customers) came online and are potential customers.

To get customers to come to your website and hit the buy button is a challenge. We have a competitive price (not the lowest price on the web) because we want to make a living. Cutting prices down to "bottom sales price" is not an option for us.

However, as a small business owner you have one major advantage: customer service. And that brings customer back over and over again. Our customer service includes several things:

1. Toll-free telephone number for US & Canadian customers on EVERY page on our website. Many customers call us while on the website and usually we complete a sale and have a happy, returning, customer.

2. Customers never get an answering machine. If the phone lines are busy or we are unable to pick up the phone after three rings, the call rings thru to a live answer service which emails us the message in seconds.

3. All items on the website are in stock. That is a daily challenge! We have two warehouses on our premises and can put our hands on any item quickly.

4. Same day shipping. All orders placed between 2 and 3 p.m. are shipped the same day.

5. Pack the order very, very carefully. If the book is not shrink-wrapped, we wrap it in brown paper. We have special made cardboard to stiffen Priority Flat Rate Envelopes and use only new shipping materials.

Since most of our orders go with USPS, we order the shipping material from the post-office (it's free). We also have a wide selection of boxes, DVD mailers etc available for shipping-there is nothing worse than having to pack 30 to 100 packages in a single day and not being able to find the proper box.

6. Make sure to ship the correct item. That means checking and double checking orders by name, product, and location.

7. All postage is printed online. We use Endicia.com and love it. Labels look clean and professional. Also, thru the postal log page we can check the Delivery Confirmation number with one mouse click. We NEVER stay in line at the post-office. We push our bins, with packages, thru the service door and give the postmaster a wave and off we go.

8. We take the time to write "Thank you" on every invoice or packing slip and we sign it. Yes, signing our names 100 times a day is more the norm then not, but it is worth it. We also include a business card with every order.

What types of advertisements do you run, where do you place them, and what results have you received based on those various places?

The key to our success is advertising, really. We run some ads in trade magazines, US & Internationally. However, the big jump in hits to the website came with paid advertising. About 4 years ago we started to pay for keywords on Overture (nowadays Yahoo). We jumped quickly from 2,000 hits/day to 4,000 hits and by adding more keywords to 10,000 hits/day.

About 2-1/2 years ago we added Google keywords. Yes, it costs dearly, especially since more and more sellers jump on the bandwagon, but the results are worth it. Today we run at 60,000 to 80,000 hits/day and peak season over 100,000 hits/day.

Another advertising ploy is discounts. We are members to several camera clubs and request to be linked to their websites. In return, we offer 10% discount to buyers who identify themselves as a member of one of these club.

Oh, and we ship internationally. Forty percent of our sales go overseas. We are not intimidated by shipping overseas and filling out custom forms which means more business. In fact, we ship overseas daily.

Finally, we sell through other websites like, Amazon.com, ABE, Alibris, Barnes & Nobles etc.

To learn more about Petra Kellers and her wonderful online store dedicated to photographers everywhere, visit her site at http://CameraBooks.com

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