Powell's Books buying online: David Goggins book "Can't Hurt Me"

Powell’s books is updating their website. I love Powell’s Bookstore where you can buy new and used books all on the same shelf! You can look at the prices of each book and find the cheapest one, it’s like everyday is a sale. In starting this blog I knew that I wanted to recommend Powell’s for online shopping (they’ve had the convenience of online shopping since before bookstores were scrambling to keep customers). Even Stephen Colbert recommended Powell’s Books as a preferred place to purchase books.

https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2269#m24525

So, here’s some things to know since I recently tried it myself. If it’s the first time you are ordering online from Powell’s do so during regular business hours.

www.powells.com is available 24/7 but the

customer service hours are daily 9am–5pm PT and

phone number is 800-878-7323.

They are updating their website and brought it in-house instead of third party, and right now there are some lingering errors. In the long run this will be great because they will be able to fix things quicker. Here’s what happened, and why I recommend this. I created an account and placed an order online because my books were only available at a local warehouse. When I was at the last step of the checkout I received an error message to contact Powell’s (info above). So I did and the wonderful person on the other line explained that they have been trying to troubleshoot the error, but it seems that the old website is not saving the credit card information. She took my order over the phone, and then once the order was confirmed I had found another local warehouse book that I wanted to purchase and ordered that online. The second order had saved my credit card information throughout the entire transaction and I was able to purchase entirely online without having to call customer service.

Some other interesting information that I learned during this process was about what ‘local warehouse’ means on Powell’s website. Powell’s main store: 1005 W Burnside St Portland, OR 97209 has over 1 Million books and is multiple floors on a full city block! Even with all of that shelf space there are still some books that don’t fit on the shelves and are kept in another warehouse downtown (which is where my first order came from). Also, when an author self-publishes the ISBN allows bookstores to sell the books, but some books Powell’s has to order/send from the publisher and when that happens the location will also be listed as ‘local warehouse’.

For example the second order that I placed online (which again went through and was delivered to the store seamlessly) was “Can’t Hurt Me” by David Goggins. Here’s some tidbits about him:

Believe You’re Here For a Reason - https://youtu.be/xjkRP2V3o7M

What If You Could? - https://youtu.be/ipVrphmIIkQ

Toughest Man Alive - https://youtu.be/BUU7_sG6T9I