Reporting Online and In-Store Sales

Reporting to Indie Bestsellers only:

• To report only online sales, follow steps 1 and 6.

• To report online sales and in-store sales, follow steps 1 through 4 and 6.

Reporting to the New York Times only:

• To report only online sales, follow steps 1 and 5.

• To report online sales and in-store sales, follow steps 1 through 5.

Reporting to the New York Times and Indie Bestsellers:

• To report only online sales, follow steps 1, 5, and 6.

• To report online sales and in-store sales, follow steps 1 through 6.

1. Prepare your Online Sales report

   1. If you are an IndieCommerce/IndieLite user:

      1. Sign in to your site and visit store -> reports -> NYT Bestseller Report *

      2. In the Order status field, select your completed sales statuses (generally both Completed by warehouse and Completed)

      3. Select the start and end dates and times for the week (generally 12:00AM Sunday to 11:59PM Saturday)

      4. Click Apply

      5. After the report is generated, click CSV below the displayed records to download the report as a CSV file and save the file to a convenient, known location on your computer

   2. If you use another eCommerce system:

      1. Export a CSV file from your system composed of one line for each title sold during the Sunday through Saturday of the reporting period detailing, for each book, the ISBN and total quantity sold for that ISBN, headed, respectively with “SKU” and “Quantity”

      2.  If you are only reporting online sales, skip to step 5, Log in to NYTimes.com and report following instructions provided by NYT.

2. Prepare your In-Store Sales report

   1. Follow the directions at the following address to export in-store sales figures from your POS.
      https://www.bookweb.org/professional-bookselling/indiebound/bestselledrs/reporting-instructions 

3. Combine Sales Reports

   1. Append your in-store sales to your online sales to create a single file using Google Sheets or Excel

      1. Copy your ISBN and Quantity data from your Online Sales report 

      2. Create a new Google Sheets spreadsheet or Excel file and select cell A1

      3. Paste your ISBN and Quantity data

      4. Copy the ISBN and Quantity data from your In-Store Sales report

      5. Select the first blank cell in column A in your Google Sheets spreadsheet

      6. Paste your ISBN and Quantity data

      7. Aggregate the sales using the directions below (“Aggregating Sales”) to ensure each ISBN only appears once and represents all sales for that ISBN.

4. Aggregate Sales in Google Sheets

   1. The New York Times limits stores to one sales report submission per week and requires that each ISBN appears only once in that report representing the total sales for that book. To provide sales figures from two different sources, the sales reports must be combined and the quantities per ISBN totaled. The following method for accomplishing this uses Google Sheets to total the ISBNs (requires a Google account).

      1. Create a new Google Sheets spreadsheet

      2. Select cell A1 then copy/paste your sales data into the sheet, starting at cell A1 (the result should be two columns of data, the ISBNs in column A and the quantities in column B)

      3. Select cell D1 then copy/paste the following formula into cell D1
         = QUERY(A:B,"select A, sum(B) group by A",-1)

      4. The aggregated figures should be automatically displayed in columns D and E.

      5. Select columns D and E.

      6. In the Edit menu, select Copy.

      7. At the lower left of the browser window, click the plus symbol to add a new sheet

      8. Select cell A1 in the newly created sheet

      9. In the Edit menu, select Paste special, then Paste values only

      10. Change the text in cell A1 to ISBN

      11. Change the text in cell B1 to Quantity

      12. In the File menu, select Download, then Comma-separated values (.csv, current sheet) to download a CSV of the aggregated data of just the second sheet

5. Log in to NYTimes.com and report following instructions provided by NYT

6. Report to Indie Bestsellers

   1. If you report in-store sales directly to BookScan via your POS, you can only submit online sales via BookWeb (and can continue to report in-store sales to BookScan)

   2. If you report sales via a file upload to BookWeb, use the following method

      1. Log in to BookWeb.org from 3pm ET Saturday, to 3am ET Tuesday

      2. Visit /bestsellers/report

      3. Click “File Upload” in the menu at the left of the page

      4. On the resulting page, leave “Point of Sale System” set to “Other”

      5. Click “Browse” and select your sales file from your local file

      6. Select the number of outlets the report represents

      7. Check “Yes” if you wish to provide your sales reports to BookScan (Your store will receive BookScan's weekly DMA Book Sales and other national reports if you participate)

      8. Click “Submit Query”