After feeling like he was being ripped off by his university’s bookstore, Tito Bohrt wanted to find a new way for students to sell their books on campus and get more money for them.

Bohrt, along with Fabio Berger, Yang Zeng and Silvia Seceleanu, were sophomores at Duke University when they created a website called ShelfRelief.com. Incorporating ideas from Craigslist and Amazon, ShelfRelief looks to eliminate the irritations of shipping and lower buyback prices by allowing students to sell books to other students on their campus.

Five months after developing the website idea, Bohrt and his colleagues launched ShelfRelief in fall 2010. Originally for Duke students only, ShelfRelief gained a large following during its first year of operations, Bohrt said.

‘We got a lot more users than we thought.’ Bohrt said. ‘People are really excited about it.’

After Zeng and Seceleanu left the company to pursue other interests, Bohrt said he and Berger opened the website to other schools across the nation, including Syracuse University.

The concept for the website is simple: Students create an account associated with the college or university they attend using their school email address and then post the books they want to sell on the website at a price set by the user. When a book is sold, the buyer pays online using the website’s ‘Book Budget’ system, which allows customers to reuse funds they already used for textbooks. They can also use PayPal or a credit card, and then meet the seller on campus to receive the book.

‘Our core competency is to be really student-oriented,’ Bohrt said. ‘Buying and selling books was a pain, and we wanted to be that solution.’

Since the beginning, Bohrt said he and Berger have not been looking to make money, but instead help fellow students. To show this, Bohrt said ShelfRelief donated all of its profits to the SOS Children’s Village in Mallasa, Bolivia, during its first year of operations.

‘We always said that if we started making money we would donate it,’ Bohrt said. ‘It would be a way to show people that we are not doing this for the money.’

The SOS Children’s Village, which has locations around the globe, provides orphans with a stable home life and education. Bohrt said he chose the Bolivian location because it is where he is originally from and because he said a large percentage of Bolivians live under a dollar a day in wages.

ShelfRelief is still a start-up, but it is gaining users and schools every day. Bohrt said the website reached 4,500 users a few days ago. He said the website has been a huge success and became bigger than he had ever expected.

‘Success to us doesn’t mean getting the most users possible or getting the most money as possible,’ Bohrt said. ‘Success for us is making our customers happy.’

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Published on April 17, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Tyler: [email protected]