• If you have not already signed up for Edelweiss, you will need to do so to sign up for Edelweiss Analytics.
• Click here to register for Edelweiss. Then fill out this form to add Edelweiss Analytics to your account as well.

• Nothing! It is currently free to bookshops in the British Isles.

• This will depend on your epos system, but typically their support team will take care of this part for you. We’ll notify them once you sign up. Please make sure to select the right epos system when completing the form.
• If you use Bertline or Gardlink, we'll get you up and running within days! If you have another ePOS or inventory management system, please contact us for more information.

• We have lots of help online here, as well as the recorded webinars below. We’ll also be running a webinar soon for UK booksellers specifically.
  • Getting to Know Summit (Analytics Training)
  • How to Balance Your Inventory Using Edelweiss Analytics
  • Using Edelweiss Analytics for Returns 
• Our full Edelweiss Analytics help site is here. You can also access this from within Edelweiss from the HELP menu in the far upper right of each page.

• Please contact us anytime at support@abovethetreeline.com

• Which books are doing well with my peers that we don’t stock?
• How can I track the impact of a promotion or display over time?
• Which forthcoming books are ordered by my peers but not us?
• Which books are my peers most excited about?
• Which areas of the shop’s stock need attention?
• Should I return these books, or just merchandise them differently?
• How can I easily track turnover by section or publisher?
• I have more than one shop. How would I compare performance of the kids sections to each other?

• You should see Analyticsin the top horizontal menu within Edelweiss, alongside Catalogs, Orders, and so on.

• You will only see this if you have signed up for Edelweiss Analytics and are sending data from your shop’s inventory or epos system. Also, you need to have access enabled, but if you are a user administrator you can grant access to yourself and other staff.
• If you are User Admin in Edelweiss, you can go to your Profile, select Account users, and one of your staff members, and check the ‘Analytics Viewer’ box to give a staff member access to Analytics. More detailed directions can be found

• Go to the tool icon at the top of the Edelweiss page and select Analyticsfrom the menu. From there, you can hide lanes you don’t want to see and rearrange the order of the lanes on your screen.

• Each lane has View Titles in Grid at the right-hand side of the lane. If you click that, all the titles will appear below, and the other lanes will be hidden. To go back to seeing all the other lanes, click Collapse Title Grid.
• Note that you can sort on the headings in the Title Grid. Often, you’ll want to sort by things like how many you have in stock, which titles are on hand at the most shops, etc.

• Go to Apply Filterat the top left of the Analytics lanes. Select an existing saved filter, or one of your POS categories, or create a new saved filter here. Or you can use one of the Quick Filters below that to quickly review a particular section or BIC category.  Saved filters can combine all kinds of attributes, so are a powerful way to review titles in Edelweiss in general but are really key to using Edelweiss  Analytics fully! For example, you can create a Top Sellers list for all hardcover fiction, or review most ordered forthcoming titles in YA in Top Not Yet Released, or you could create a filter that combines several of your own POS categories into one filter for reviewing the state of a larger part of the shop than a single section.

• This index is a measure of combined shelf days. For example, if you have one copy of a title, and it’s been on the shelf for 14 days since activity (since it sold or was last received) then the number for that title is 14. If you had 2 copies of the same book though, and it was 14 days since the last activity, then the shelf days would be 28. So generally, the higher the number, the ‘staler’ the title. An index of 0 just means you don’t have it. A very low index might mean you don’t have enough stock, but the book would be in the ‘fresh/hot’ category.

• Use the Most Popular lane and review the titles in the red wedge of the pie. Note the aggregated peer group information on the left. Remember to select a BIC code or filter in other ways to get to specific lists. Make sure you are comparing to the UK Indies peer group in the settings.

• You can collect titles together either by adding them to a collection, or by adding tags to them. Once you have done that, you can filter all of the lanes on the Analytics page by either the collection, or tags, or even multiple tags, which are listed in the Quick Filters section on the left of the page. The Historical Overview lane is most useful for tracking performance of those titles over time. Learn more about creating collections and tags.

• The Category Performance Comparison chart is a way to compare your shop’s sections to each other and see if there are any surprises. Then you can use the Most Popular lane to select titles to add to a fast-turning section, or Stock Analysis to identify some titles for return.

• The Not Yet Released lane is just the thing. Like Most Popular, you might want to apply a BIC code as a filter to break up the list. The red wedge of the pie chart represents the titles that you don’t have on order in your epos system. You might want to add an end date in the settings to make sure you’re getting a view of the most imminent titles to make sure you haven’t missed anything big that’s coming out very soon.

• Not Yet Released can be helpful here too, but you should also take a look at the Buzz section of Edelweiss to see which titles have the more reviews or are on the shelves of other booksellers in your network.

• Use the Stock Analysislane to identify a group of titles, then View Titles in Grid. There you can sort by quantity sold, or date last sold to see the books you’ve sold the most of, or more recently. Use the settings to change the time frame for your sales.

• If you see titles you want to pick up for the shop, we recommend you add them to a collection or use a tag to organize them. You can add several titles at once to a collection by selecting them then using Add To Collectionoption on the Other Actions menu. The later you can review the list and add to an order or create a new one.

• The ‘Stale’ wedge in your Stock Analysis (or any) lane will show you the most overstocked titles. You could sort these by AI (Shelf Days) with the highest first. If you see a book that is not doing well for you but is for other shops according to the market data, you might want to re-merchandise it. Otherwise, you can export to Excel from here, or tag them, or add to a collection to collate a group of titles.

• When you find relatively new books that are stale and overstocked in numbers, it’s often an easy decision to reduce that stack down to just one copy of even return them all. But you might wonder if there’s still hope for it if your moved it to another section, faced it out, or included in a display. Having the context of the market of your peers can help make the decision easier. You’ll see what percentage of your peers have been selling it, and how much stock they have. If it’s working for them, then maybe it’s worth promoting in some way and reassessing after that.

• The Historical Overview is designed to show you trends over time, and this can be helpful when working with a sales rep or purchasing and returning in general. If you filter by publisher, you’ll gain insights into how that publisher’s books have been performing over time. You might be over or under-buying them consistently. The same applies to sections – of course, your shop is unique, and you’re bound to overrepresent some categories relative to sales, and that’s part of your curation and flavour of the shop. But you can do that more consciously by looking at the turn and whether it’s declining or increasing.

• Shop owners with more than one branch can compare those branches to each other. You will likely know how they compare overall, but using the Location Performance Comparison lane with a filter applied, such as your kids’ categories can illustrate differences that can help direct your stock management. Also, you can use the Location Comparison lane to drill down to specific titles that are overstocked in one shop that might be transferred to another one, saving time and freight costs in returns.

Here are a few ideas.

• Edelweiss is all online, so you can access it from anywhere.
• It works well on a tablet (although it’s a bit small for a smartphone)
• Have a checklist of things to do in Edelweiss Analytics. For example:
  • Daily you could take a peek at the titles that sold the day before, and sort by their overall popularity or your sales.
  • Monthly you could review comparison of your shop sections to each other to pick a section to focus on improving in some way.
  • Weekly you could check out the new titles coming out in the next week or two, and make sure you have key titles on order. .
  • These titles would be printed out for the staff to get to know, or turned into a flyer or email to post in the shop or send to your customers to try and encourage some pre-orders.
• Remember that returning some of the most obvious ‘low hanging fruit’ makes space to add some exciting titles that your peers are selling and are likely to ‘pay their way!’
• Edelweiss can help you and staff learn more about titles, read proofs, see other booksellers’ opinions, and help you become an even better hand-seller.
• You might ask other staff members to take on researching or carrying out your checklist in Edelweiss and Analytics. You can give any number of staff access to Edelweiss+Analytics - they can’t break anything!