Textbook Finding and Buying Made Easy with Campus Shift

Last year, KegFLY gave OU students ways to find deals in Athens to help soften the blow of expensive college living. For example, pay $15 and get $35 to spend at Zoe’s Fine Dining. KegFLY also hosted many events on campus, plus 8Fest ticket deals.

Maxx Blank and Zac Sebo, 2010 OU graduates and the founders of KegFLY, decided for personal reasons to put the business aside last year. Now, Sebo is back with a new group of entrepreneurs and a new business: Campus Shift.

Sebo, along with two Kent State alumni, Chris Haynes and Dan Fisher, Akron alumnus Derek Hoake and Bowling Green alumnus Darren Mills, came together to create Campus Shift after getting hooked up through Cleveland’s LaunchHouse, a “pre-seed investment fund and business accelerator that invests just enough capital to get an idea off the ground,” LaunchHouse’s website states.

The main idea behind Campus Shift involves three ideas: search, swap and save.

Campus Shift will have an innovative textbook search where students in Athens can also swap with other OU students. The textbook portion started because of Haynes’ previous work with a company called BookDefy.

“We are going to find people on campus that have the book that you are looking for and we’ll actually be able to set you guys up on campus in a safe location at a business uptown and you’ll be able to swap books,” Sebo explains.

Textbook swapping will run off a credit system. A search engine will allow students to view the prices of the book on other websites and also through the swapping system of Campus Shift.

“One credit is equal to one dollar. If it is worth 15 credits you spend $15 dollars on that instead of $40 or $50 dollars on another website or $100 in the store,” Haynes says. “You take those credits and put them into Joe Schmo’s account. You basically transfer them in our system.”

A “fair market value system” scours the Internet and marks the price for students’ books in between a range of the high and low prices that other websites have it selling for.

“The books on our site are on average 75% cheaper than the bookstore,” Haynes says.

Many students might particularly enjoy the idea of swapping as opposed to selling to others through a textbook exchange. In order to participate in the swapping, participants must sign up with an “.edu” email address.

“That email is kind of like a social security number for a student,” Haynes notes. “When those matches are arranged, if something God forbid did happen, we would be able to know who was at that meeting and be able to assist in any way.”

Another plus to the swapping: there are no cash transactions. The credits will not be transferred on the website until the swap is completed. In addition, students will get a user rating. The better rating you have, the more you will get for your textbooks.

“The more confident you are in others swapping with you, the more money you’ll get for your books,” Haynes advises.

In addition to easier textbook finding and swapping, a community portion will incorporate aspects of what KegFLY provided.

“KegFLY was one deal at a time,” Sebo says. “Now what we’re going to do is create a very simple and direct advertising platform for businesses to post digital coupons.”

To Haynes, this different concept is a sort of “digital newspaper.” You can view the coupon and print on the spot. Thus far, ten businesses on Court Street have signed deals.

Now, students won’t have to put their credit card information into the website and the businesses providing deals will get paid in real time, Sebo says.

Campus Shift will launch on February 13 with a 9Fest pre-sale deal. Tickets will be on sale for $20 as opposed to $30. In addition, the first 500 to buy pre-sale tickets will also get VIP access with artist meet and greets.

“I know for sure what [the headliner] could be,” Sebo hints. “I just know that if the plan works, it could be the best one ever.”