Reservations in a nutshell

Whether you are a supplier or a customer, you should pay extreme attention to the pages that talk about reservations and especially this page because what is said here will determine whether or not you decide to use reservations.

Reminder: After critically thinking, we decided that reservation fees will be 1,000 FCFA.

Reservations, how challenging is it for suppliers

If you are a supplier, take a moment here and think what it will actually mean to accept reservation requests from customers. It might go something like this:

• Firstly, you will have to make sure that all the textbooks you offer are on CTBN.
• Secondly, you will have to determine who has priority to you; those who reserve, or those that come on-site to pay for textbooks without a reservation.
• Thirdly, once you have determined who has priority, how do you organize yourself in order to serve both those who reserve and those that do not? This is very important because those who reserve will expect the textbooks they have reserved to be given to them considering the fact that they pay a fee for that, and those that come on-site to pay for textbooks have searched on CTBN and found out that you have the textbooks they need.

What could go wrong? A problem that could arise is that you are so focused on serving those on-site that you cannot update the textbook count on CTBN. Those that use CTBN will continue to see the number of textbooks you added even if the count is decreasing in real-time. What is worse is that they might actually make a reservation for textbooks that are finished.

Is there a hotfix? There are two actually, and CTBN prefers and has adopted #2.

Hotfix #1: Switch to RESERVATION mode

As the name suggest, the supplier switches to reservation mode only. As far as academic textbooks are concerned, suppliers do not accept on-site visits without prior reservation. This has a couple of advantages:

• You have total control over when customers come and collect their reservations,
• You can easily manage your textbooks since what customers see when they make a search is always true.

Reservation mode requires that you go through each reservation, carefully selecting the textbooks and grouping them for each customer, and marking the reservation as “ready” so that customers can come and collect; in this mode, your discipline will be tested.

Hotfix #2: Switch to SEARCH mode

In this mode, you do not allow any customer to make a reservation. This means that they can only search for, and view the textbooks they need from you. After that, they will have to come on-site to pay the textbooks. By default, CTBN puts every supplier in SEARCH mode so that customers can only search for, and view the textbooks they need from a supplier who has them. After a search, they will not see the “reserve” link on the search result of a supplier who is in SEARCH mode.

At the end

Handling reservations is very complex if you do not have a plan. It requires a lot of organization and discipline, especially when you are doing it alone. We have decided to leave it in the hands of the supplier to make the call; to reserve, or not to reserve? Bear in mind that you MUST be able to accept any consequences that result from your choice and not make the customer have to bear it with you. They can only make reservations if you tell them that you can handle it, never forget that.

If you feel like you can handle reservations, then you can change your mode by going to Dashboard → My Account → Information → Update information.

Reservations and customers

As mentioned earlier, customers can make reservations if and only if suppliers use the RESERVATION mode. Once that is the case, customers can make a reservation for a particular search result. Once the supplier marks that reservation as ready, the customer will receive an email with some details about the reservation.

Your reservation being ready means that you can go and collect it at the supplier. Once you collect and pay, the supplier will mark your reservation as paid and you will again receive an email informing you that you have successfully collected and paid for your reservation.

Note: A customer can cancel their reservation at anytime by going to Dashboard → Reservations → Cancel. When you do this, everything is reset, from the textbooks of the supplier to your textbook group and your customer collectors. If your customer collector had been assigned to just 1 reservation and that reservation is cancelled, your customer collector is automatically deleted.

Note: A supplier can also cancel a reservation if and only if that reservation has not been collected after it was marked ready at least 3 days ago. To do this, go to Dashboard → Reservations → English Section | French Section → Cancel.

Tip: Suppliers, if a reservation was marked ready at least 3 days ago and the customer has not yet claimed the reservation on-site, you will have to take a decision. Call them and try to find out why they have not claimed their reservation yet, or assume they do not want it anymore and cancel the reservation.