How does Shepherd work with global audiences?

Shepherd is designed for English-speaking audiences globally. All the links on the website are smart links and will take visitors to the bookshop in their country/region. 

So, if a visitor is in the UK it will take them to the UK version of Amazon and Bookshop.org. If a visitor is in the USA it will take them to Amazon USA and Bookshop USA. If a visitor is in India it will take them to Amazon India. And, so on. 

We are trying to promote Bookshop.org in the USA and UK as we love their model. Bookshop.org gives 30% of sales to indie bookstores, and they have given over $23,000,000 dollars back to indie bookstores as of November 2022. And, for their affiliate partners, they give 10% of any book sold to us and 10% goes back into a general pool to give to indie bookstores. They are growing fast and we would love to support them as Amazon needs more competition as well.

I plan to add additional bookstore partners as we grow, national and regional. We have to link to partners programmatically, so they need some type of URL structure based on ISBN or an API for us to do that. As of December 1st, 2022 we already have 35,000+ books in our system. So there are significant technical challenges and costs to adding new bookstore partners.

If you have a suggestion, please email me at ben@shepherd.com, as I'd love to hear from you.