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Article: An Entrepreneur Edges Into Amazon's Domain

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An Entrepreneur Edges Into Amazon's Domain

Once Amazon.com hit it big with its online superstore, it seemed there was no space on the web for new booksellers on the web. There's Barnes and Noble's bn.com, of course, but they have deep pockets, strong relationships with suppliers, and peerless name recognition.

Enter Sundeep Bhan, a former Penn premed with a nose for business and a strong sense that there was a place for him on the web - it was just a matter of finding it. In September 1997, Bhan and three friends founded MedBookStore.com in New York City. The business was a natural outgrowth of an earlier online endeavor - selling a medical spell-checking program on the web. They attracted visitors with Medsite.com, a site featuring a medical search engine that reviews medical and health-related web sites. But Bhan knew there was more money to be made from his audience; so he tailored the online bookstore concept to fit his needs.

In the U.S. alone, medical students, doctors, nurses and other health care professionals buy $1 billion of medical books a year. And the demand for English-language medical books is increasing as more foreign medical schools choose to teach in English. According to Bhan, 20 percent of his business comes from 60 countries outside of the US. Their bookstore features more than 90,000 books and CD-ROMS, including review books and software, 85% of which can be shipped in one business day. Both Amazon and MedBookStore.com can get you the latest edition of the Tarascon Pocket Pharmacopoeia, but what if you need a gross pathology tumor atlas? MedBookStore.com can get you the 1997 edition on a CD-ROM in one business day. Amazon, meanwhile, only offers a 1985 paperback, and it'll take them 4-6 weeks. MedBookStore.com offers student discounts as well.

So far, the company has spent a minimal amount on advertising and marketing, instead reaching medical students by developing on-line bookstores for five U.S. medical schools. It targets medical and health professionals by creating partnerships with 250 medical organizations and web sites - including Physicians Online and Nursing Spectrum. The company offers 5% of book sales to each organization that sells MedBookStore products through its own site. Bhan's company handles all of the actual transactions, and even helps partners build their own online store for free.

The company's niche marketing strategy has definitely been paying off - to the tune of $3 million in sales for 1998. The dramatic increase (from $300,000 the previous year) was enough to convince venture capitalists to invest $3 million in December 1998. Bhan and his partners intend to use that money to expand the company's offerings to include subscriptions to medical journals and supplies like stethoscopes. In addition, the company has set up a subsidiary in Bangalore, India (home of cheap programmers) to update the company's software.