Just over a year after East View Cartographic in Minneapolis purchased the Map Link name and launched a separate wholesale map operation, East View Map Link, it is focusing on the e-commerce piece of the Map Link business. “There’s a lot of positive movement going forward and a lot of things in the hopper,” says Christopher Group, director of e-commerce sales & marketing, who joined the company in September after selling East View his map site geared to consumers, TrekTools.com.
“I would say that e-commerce is a fair majority of what we’ll be doing in the future,” says Group. “We’re starting to go back and contact [the old] Map Link customers and let them know we’re here again. I have the knowledge of when I was a customer and how I would like things done.” Among Map Link’s new reseller offerings, which Group did well with at TrekTools, is drop shipping. He had almost every Map Link title on his Web site, but let them ship from their inventory.
By the beginning of May, Group expects to have the new MapLink.com fully up and running. The Web site will link to East View’s current shopping carts—EVMapLink.com for resellers and TrekTools.com for end-users—and offer close to 7,000 titles. He would like MapLink.com to serve as “a publisher showcase” just like the company’s paper catalogue, which will be available at the end of February. And he has the same design team working on a coherent image for the catalogue and the sites. Listings will be organized geographically and by publisher. For now, the number of featured publishers will be limited, but Group plans to add all publishers by next year.
For independents, East View has been using commission reps to get maps into bookstores with mixed results. “At the end of the day,” says Group, “if bookstores don’t have maps, it’s hard to say, ‘Spend a thousand dollars and see if it will sell.’ ” While Group can’t necessarily overcome the space issue at many stores, he does hope to come up with a way around asking booksellers to make a steep financial investment. “We’ll be working on that in 2012,” he says. “Not everyone wants to go to Barnes & Noble for a map.” East View is also in the midst of developing an affiliate marketing program for booksellers and other retailers.
