Selling Books Online: Book Listing Services vs. eBay

[mandy]

3 part article on selling books online

Part I:  Bookselling has always had an aura about it that many people find attractive. Few commodities can be found so readily and converted into a profit as easily as books. With the advent of online bookselling, all that has changed

Part 1:  http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/tren...hp/3548951

In Part I, we introduced you to the world of online book selling. Today, we dive into many of the popular book listing sites.

Part 2:  http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/tren...hp/3552221

eBay works because 'buying and selling on eBay is entertaining.' Add to this the huge worldwide user base ready to buy and sell, and you have a dynamic book market unique on the Internet.

Part 3: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/tren...hp/3552506

[bargainbloodhound]

By most estimates, only 10-15 percent of online book sales are for used books. This leaves the lion's share of the Internet market to new, in-print, and

niche markets such as college textbooks (a currently explosive segment of the market

,)

...and yet they didn't include the textbook sites TextbookX and Valore on the list of book sites.  :

On average, books auctioned on eBay achieve a high wholesale price only - often considerably less than they can be listed for on the retail selling platforms.

Yep, same with CDs

Rare and desirable books, particularly those bargain priced, will sell quickly on the Internet - within several weeks. But the vast majority of books can, and do, take months or years to sell

Yep, same with CDs 

[Nat]

Periodically I look for rare out of print books and oddly enough I've never even thought of looking on eBay.  I don't know why, I just automatically head over to abebooks.com and every time found what I was looking for.

One particular book I was looking for for 8 years and the only place I was able to find it was on abebooks shortly after I got internet access.

Yup, you got to love the internet for having access to more places to possibly find those rare and hard to find books.

[simtech]

One other service worth mentioning is eBay's half.com site.  I run an online bookstore and have been fiddling with different shopping cart packages as well as toying with the various online services.  I'm not too keen on their monthly fees though...  I'd be interested in hearing any feedback as to what kind of sales people had with Amazon, Alibris, TomFolio, etc., and if it was worth the monthly fee.

I started listing my newer books on half.com and with roughly 1600 titles listed I'm selling about 10-15 a week.

The pros are:
No monthly fee.
They handle payment processing.
Nice ISBN entry.

The cons:
Only ebay members can buy.
You have to compete with people who aren't booksellers, but just have some books they are dumping and usually get the conditions wrong.
They charge a flat $3.99 for hardback shipping, of which you get $3.07.  The books usually cost more than that to ship.
They cannot handle older, non ISBN books, which eliminates pre 1970s books and private printings.


They also take a straight 15% commission.

About 75-80% of my stock is older books which are pre ISBN, so I'm wanting to also use one of the services that the article mentioned, but I haven't chosen one for sure yet.

[bargainbloodhound]

Amazon is definitely worth the $39.95 monthly.  I'm still not convinced Half is worth listing on even though it's free. 

older, non ISBN books

Try Abebooks for older books.

If you're going to be listing on multiple venues I'd also suggest using either Fillz.com or TheArtofBooks.com.  Both services automatically list your inventory to multiple venues and if you sell an item on one venue they automatically adjust your inventory on the other venues so you won't oversell an item.