More fun facts from the 2022 SIBA Census! One section of the cencus dealt entirely with store operations: staffing, hours open, point-of-sales systems and ecommerce systems, etc.

Store Hours
The most common hours of operation for SIBA Bookstores (over 50%) is from 10 AM to 5 or 6 PM Monday through Saturday, and the same again or slightly shorter on Sunday. But 11 stores are closed on Sundays, whereas 16 are closed on Mondays. The earliest any of the responding stores opened was 7 AM, and the latest any stayed open was 10 PM.

Staffing
Staff numbers ranged from 30 at the maximum down to just 1 (including the store proprietor). In fact 10 stores had just one employee!

Most SIBA stores though, about 40%, have 2-5 employees. 30% had more than 5 staff, and 14% had more than 10. Three stores listed more than 20 employees.

Point of Sales
Although one store proudly noted they still used a 1918 Cash Register at checkout, by and large most bookstores have invested in a point of sales system that tracks their inventory. Only three stores said they operated without a point of sales system at all.

The three most popular POS systems are Anthology (13%), Basil (21%), and Square (17%). But there were fully 18 different POS systems listed by census participants.

E Commerce
The vast majority of SIBA stores do have some kind of e-commerce system on their website to handle online sales. Many have multiple systems to handle multiple product categories -- one system for new books, one or more listing service for used books, another system for audiobooks, and another again for ebooks. 23 different ecommerce systems were listed in the census altogether, and only 9 stores said they had no ecommerce ability at all.

Of the ecommerce systems designed to sell new books, Bookshop.org and Indiecommerce/Lite are by far the most popular. 34% of responding stores have an IndieCommerce site, whereas over half, 52%, maintain a Bookshop.org site. A dozen responding stores maintain both.

There is no question that Bookshop.org's launch just prior to the pandemic and subsquent lockdown initiated a sea-change in SIBA bookstores' adoption of ecommerce and online sales. Prior to 2020, only about 50% of SIBA bookstores had a functional ecommerce option on their websites. Now that figure is closer to 90%

After Bookshop and IndieCommerce, the most common ecommerce options listed were Square, Shopify, Squarespace, Chrislands, and WooCommerce

The most common systems for Used and Rare Books were ABEBooks, Biblio, and Alibris