Introduction to BNC SalesData

 Welcome to BNC SalesData!

BNC SalesData is a web-based, statistics and reporting tool for use by participating members of the book industry in Canada.

It tracks sales data and stock information from traditional bookstore chains, online retailers, independent bookstores, academic and educational outlets, and library wholesalers, as well as from non-traditional sources such as discount and specialty stores.

Information from retail sources is collected in an anonymous database, allowing booksellers to share their sales information without exposing themselves to individual analysis by competitors. This information is then matched with bibliographic data to present complete title information for a week of sales.

Subscribers can search by title, contributor, ISBN, publisher, binding, and other criteria to create customized reports that display titles with ranking, sales volume, value, and totals of on-hand and on-order. Reports can be viewed on the web, charted on the site, or downloaded in CSV or Excel format for use in offline documents and as the basis of graphs and charts.

Subscribers can also see an in-depth historical snapshot of a given title’s performance in the market, showing lifetime volume and value, current and previous bestseller positions, total on-hand and on-order numbers across the market, and detailed sales figures.

In addition to this anonymous, total-market reporting, retailers can choose to establish peer-to-peer reporting relationships with selected publishers, providing them with direct views of their sales history and on-hand/on-order positions for that retailer alone. This can help publishers be more responsive to the retailer’s individual supply-and-demand profile.

A note about different types of accounts

Different types of accounts have different views of the data.

For example, agents, wholesalers and libraries will at times see a different view than retailers. Throughout this help manual, we will call out differences for account types when they exist.