Bookseller taps ChatGPT for personalized customer experience

ThriftBooks, an online independent used bookseller marking its 20th anniversary this year, knows that success is all about helping customers find a book to read or a book they're searching to purchase.

Meeting customer expectations is the key reason it has sold 235 million used books since it launched as a business relying on a pick-up truck of used books stashed in a storage unit.

The starting point, according to CEO Ken Goldstein, was operating as a seller on Amazon and its first book sold was the children's classic, Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White.

"It quickly became clear that we would need more space and more books and took up residence in an old warehouse on Mercer Street in downtown Seattle," said Goldstein in an email interview. "Over two decades, we've created five regional processing centers across the country to serve 265 countries globally, and employ more than 1,150 people. Each of those centers is about 10 times larger than our original Mercer Street location."

The company sells primarily off its e-commerce site, ThriftBooks.com but has remained on Amazon and also sells on eBay, Abe and other commerce sites geared toward book lovers.

From the start ThriftBooks was all about tapping and improving technology and processes to purchase, grade and distribute used and rare collectible tomes.

"Books with an ISBN are graded through our automated processing system while those without are hand-graded based on condition and our receivers determine whether we should keep, donate or recycle them," said Goldstein.

ThriftBooks uses a "carefully calibrated blend" of human oversight and automated systems, according to Goldstein.

"Our award-winning customer service team and our five-star rating on Trustpilot, with more than 1.3 million reviews, provide our customers assurance to shop with confidence while finding books they love and look forward to reading," he said.

Now the "blend" includes the hottest tech innovation — ChatGPT. The focus is using the AI innovation to understand what customers are buying, what they're interested in and overall purchase history in order to serve up the most personalized customer experience at the online store.

Customer experience benefits

The bookseller is not only using ChatGPT to leverage its deep understanding of customer preferences and reading habits for personalized recommendations, but it will also be used to create interactive book previews to let users engage with content in a more immersive way. It will also act as a virtual online assistant, guiding customers through the purchasing journey.

"ThriftBooks is currently testing ChatGPT as a way to improve book recommendations and as a method to generate summarized versions of website content, including product descriptions, and author biographies. ThriftBooks can then use these variations to test which version works better with customers," said Goldstein.

The bookseller has seen Chat GPT generate concise and engaging blurbs summarizing a plot or genre.

"This can save our content creation team time and ensure consistency in style. It can assist writers by providing alternative phrases or ideas for book descriptions. This collaborative approach helps our team find more creative ways to write a book description that appeals to our different customers," he said.

Using ChatGPT, ThriftBooks can offer a browsing reader something new to read and recommendations based on purchase history that uses generative AI combined with human oversight and create a curated list of suggestions.

"By combining purchase history, and browse history, and analyzing that for commonality, ChatGPT can provide a list of titles of books they could be familiar with and a few new ones they haven't heard of or even considered," said Goldstein.

"It enables us to understand WHY a customer liked a book, and then instead of offering them a static set of best sellers in the same genre we actually help them find options with similarities across all genres. It allows us to make recommendations that are extremely personalized to each customer."

Down the road, Goldstein believes the technology will also let ThriftBooks engage with customers in a conversational manner — with discussion about reading preferences, favorite genres and authors.

"Using this information, it can provide even more highly personalized book recommendations, helping customers discover new titles they might enjoy. ChatGPT could also provide interactive book previews by generating short excerpts or summaries of books, giving customers a glimpse of the content to help them make more informed purchase decisions," he said.

"Perhaps it could even interact with customers in a virtual discussion on a book they just read like a virtual book club for example."

Photo provided by ThriftBooks.