Art, sold by the kilo

Mercatorfonds publishes art books. Museum catalogues, monographs and illustrated books on just about everything between archaeology and contemporary art, with architecture, cultural history and photography along the way. They are the publishing partner of The National Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, BOZAR and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. The office sits on Zuidstraat in Brussels, open nine to five.

For years this page promised their webshop was “coming soon”. It has been running for a while now. Time to say what is actually in it.

The catalogue currently holds 222 titles across fifteen categories, plus the promotions. Contemporary art is the largest with 84 books, followed by modern art (51) and cultural history (30). Prices run from € 25 for a book on the postcard to € 1,000 for a limited, signed artist’s edition. Modest, in our line of work: for Sanderus Antique Maps we built a shop with more than twenty thousand products.

For every book the editors manage the subtitle, the authors, the price, an optional sale price, the categories and the related titles. Three switches do the rest: new, sale, and temporarily unavailable. That last one doesn’t hide the book, it simply says in red that it has run out. A sold-out book still deserves a page.

The site runs in Dutch, French and English. A book doesn’t simply follow along: every language edition is a different book, with its own ISBN and its own stock. Art Nouveau versus Art Deco? exists three times over, and the French edition may well be sold out while the Dutch one is still on the shelf. So you pick a language first, a basket second.

Every book also lists what you want to know before ordering: number of pages, dimensions, format, and which museum it was co-published with. The World of Songye is 580 pages in three volumes in a slipcase, by seventeen authors. Not something that fits through a letterbox.

That is where the real work of this shop sits. Every book carries a weight. The basket adds it up and finds the right bracket: up to 1 kilo, up to 2, 5, 10, 20, or above. That crosses with the destination country, and there are 57 of them, from Andorra to South Africa, with Japan, Taiwan, Mexico and the United States in between. Country times bracket gives one amount.

The delivery address may differ from the billing address, because an art book is also a gift. For VAT, the billing country is what counts: outside the EU, the six percent comes off. The parcel goes to one country, the invoice to another, and the books still balance.

In the basket you pick your country, calculate the shipping and, if you have one, enter a promo code. Those codes do three things: a percentage off, free shipping, or a free book. Payment runs through Mollie; which methods are open is for Mercatorfonds to decide in their own dashboard.

Once the payment lands, the webhook marks the order as paid, hands it the next invoice number and sends the confirmations: to the customer, to the delivery address if that carries a different mail address, and to the shop. In the CMS the orders sit in three piles: unfinished, paid, cancelled. Tick the box at checkout and you end up in the newsletter, which runs on Mailchimp.

A webshop is only finished when the accountant can use it. Behind the CMS login sits a reporting page with six reports: every order in detail, one line per book ordered; totals per book; totals per book and billing country, for VAT; the number of orders per month; shipping costs per month and country; and the full catalogue by category, stock status included. You filter by period, book title, country and paid orders only. One click turns any report into an Excel file.

That set grew with the questions. Every time accounting asked one the previous report couldn’t quite answer, another report appeared. The VAT one, for instance, exists for the orders where the invoice goes to one country and the parcel to another. It happens, and you want it in a single table rather than in a mailbox.