Elevator Pitch

Business Idea
Green Textbooks is an online forum that University and College students can use to buy and sell textbooks for free either on campus or elsewhere. Students will be able to list their books for free and specify the date they want to sell them, after they register their information. They would then wait until they have found a buyer and continue with the sale. Green Textbooks are not actually responsible for the sale of textbooks, but provide a service that allows to bring buyer and seller together, not more.

Business Model
Green Textbooks would use an Advertising Model. An advertising model is The web advertising model is an extension of the traditional media broadcast model. The broadcaster, in this case, a web site, provides content (usually, but not necessarily, for free) and services (like email, IM, blogs) mixed with advertising messages in the form of banner ads. The banner ads may be the major or sole source of revenue for the broadcaster. The broadcaster may be a content creator or a distributor of content created elsewhere. The advertising model works best when the volume of viewer traffic is large or highly specialized.

Because Green Textbooks is free to exchange, buy and/or sell textbooks our funds would come from advertisers. Users would be required to register. Registration would allow inter-session tracking of user surfing habits and thereby generates data of potential value in targeted advertising campaigns.

*Viral Marketing*
*related to wikipedia article*
We will also be incorporating viral marketing as a source of revenues. Through word of mouth, users would be traffic'd to our site and possibly even click on google ads or even purchase items off our amazon associate products.
"Viral Marketing is defined as marketing messages that spread through existing social networks, whether that is word-of-mouth among friends or through complex online dissemination programs like we’ve seen with Hotmail and Gmail.
[1] Viral marketing works because of people telling other people something. As marketers, it’s our job to:
1. Give our customers better tools to spread our marketing message, thus increasing effectiveness.
2. Measure the effectiveness of our viral marketing and promotional programs, through metrics."
source: http://www.musicgearwiki.com/index.php?title=Viral

Sustainable Advantage
Being a student myself and looking at my collection of textbooks sitting on my book shelf at home, I believe is one advantage. I know that I have purchase textbooks and the bookstore would never buy them back becasue they are either going with a different author or there was a new edition developed. Many of these 'old' textbooks can still be used in other different colleges and Universities, and student may even be able to use the 'old' textbook at a cheaper price.

Key Problem
The key problem we will be solving the stack of textbooks collecting dust on all of our bookshelves. Once students have used them, why not give someone else the chance to get use out of them as well while making a profit. Looking at the other side of it, I would rather buy a book far less expensive than what the college bookstore sells at or what Chapters or Amazon sells at.

Market Segment, Size & Growth
University and college students are our demographic. After researching this demographic we found that in B.C alone, from the ages of 20 to 29 alone our market share has the potential to involve 511,180 people (http://www.statscan.ca)./
This is a enormous market share to have a piece of!

Supply Chain

A online forum that allows students to buy and sell textbooks specifically, does not require a supply chain of any sort. GreenTextbooks is the 'middle man' that allows these students to interact with one another. We as GreenTextbooks would not be affiliated with any publishing company. Students (users) are responsible for their own 'meetings' or exchanges for the sale or purchase.

E-Commerce Transactions

To make the exchange of funds easier for our users, we would integrate a PayPal function, like eBay has integrated on their website. Users will have to have funds in their PayPal accounts to be able to purchase textbooks.

Financing

Financing Revenues will be hard to come by in the first 2 to 3 years only because there is so much competition out there. That is why we are going to use viral marketing. Being a student myself, I have the advantage of letting my peers know about GreenTextbooks. We hope to raise funds through affiliate marketing, viral marketing, selling advertising space and through Google adsense. All the money required wil be for creating the webpage its self and its domain name.