How to price used books for sale on Amazon, eBay, Half.com

When you are dealing with general stock worth modest amounts – and there are several copies listed online under $15 – there is no need to spend much time mulling pricing strategies. Supply and demand rules. If you price your copy much higher than competing offers, odds are you’ll wait a long time for a sale.

If you think the market price is fair, match the lowest price but don’t go under. The only thing lowballing accomplishes is leaving money on the table.

But what if there are no used copies listed on Amazon? In this case it’s worth your time to do some research to see what the prices are outside Amazon. Search the title on AddALL, at www.addall.com, which indexes all the major book listing sites. A similar site on which to research prices is FetchBook.Info, at www.FetchBook.info. Another favorite with online book-sellers but with somewhat slow performance is BookFinder.com, at www.BookFinder.com.

If your search turns up several listings for your title, you can get a good idea of its value by throwing out the top and bottom prices and averaging the rest. Price your copy at the top of the range.

A traditional way of describing book condition

The simplified bookseller terminology made popular on Amazon and Half.com will suffice in most cases, but dealers of antiquarian and rare books tend to use the condition terminology made popular by sellers in the 1940s:

 As new: This term is to be used only when the book is in the same perfect condition as published. It is to have no defects, missing pages, or library stamps, and the dust jacket (if issued) must be in mint condition.

 Fine: This approaches the “as new” category, but the book is not as crisp. “Fine” must also indicate no defects, and if the jacket has a small tear or other defect or looks worn, this should be noted.

 Very good: This can describe a used book that shows minor wear but has no tears to the binding or paper. Any defects must be noted.

 Good: This describes the average used, worn book that has all pages present and no defect that obscures the text. Defects must be noted.

 Fair: This is a worn book with complete text pages (including those with maps or plates) but that perhaps lacks endpapers, half-title, etc. Binding and jacket may be worn. Defects must be noted.

 Poor: This is a book that may have considerable wear but will suffice as a reading copy because it has the complete text unobscured. It may be soiled, scuffed, or stained, or have loose joints or pages. Any defects must be noted.

 Ex-library: Former library books taken out of circu-lation must be designated as library copies, no matter what their condition.

 Book club: These editions must always be noted as such, no matter what the book’s condition.

 Binding copy: This describes a book in which the pages are fine but the binding is lose or detached.

If you’re selling on Amazon, don’t assume that your customer is going to know bookselling jargon — and never describe a book as being “in good condition for its age.” The book is in good condition or it’s not.

Google plans to rent books: WSJ

The Web search firm Google is in negotiations with several large book publishers to allow consumers to rent books online for a weekly fee, according to an item in the Wall Street Journal.

Users wouldn't be able to print or download the books, at least initially.

Google has taken a public-relations beating for its Library program, which many publishers oppose. At the same time, publishers are signing up for Google's Book Search program in hopes of gaining increased exposure for their books and increased sales.

Amazon unveils 'Historical Pricing' service

Late Friday, Amazon.com announced a new service enabling its Markeptlace sellers to research historical sales data. Amazon Historical Pricing provides access to over three years of Amazon sales data on books, music, videos, and DVDs.

It's unclear how many users will be able to afford the service's hefty fees of $499 per month. The service returns the average, minimum, maximum, and median price for items with a sales history, allowing users to examine pricing trends.

Users can specify up to 10 item IDs and request date ranges of a week, month or quarter -- or request up to ten date ranges for a given item ID.

The service will cost $499 monthly for up to 20,000 request per month, or $999 for up to 60,000 requests per month. Through Jan. 31, 2006, an introductory rate will be offered: $249 per month for up to 60,000 requests per month, 75 percent off the regular rate.

According to Amazon, the service will help booksellers optimize selling prices and subsequent gross margins. Reviewing historical pricing information over time is expected to provide a window into the seasonality of certain merchandise.

Users will be able to access historical pricing information on books currently unlisted and out-of-print, which should help them determine an optimal selling price. Amazon points out that this pricing information is otherwise unavailable.

How to assign condition for used books

As the popular marketplaces have brought used books to the masses over the past few years, the terminology used by booksellers to describe the condition of used books has simplified. The streamlined system in use today on the popular online marketplaces follows these guidelines:

 New: A brand new, unread copy in perfect condition. Dust cover is intact; pages are pristine; book is suit-able for a gift.

 Like New: An apparently unused copy in perfect condition. Suitable for a gift.

 Very Good: A copy that has been read but is still in excellent condition. Pages are intact and contain no underlining, highlighting, or notes.

 Good: A good reading copy, clean, with all pages intact and dust jacket present (if issued). Spine may show some wear, and pages may include limited notes and highlighting.

 Acceptable: A usable copy. All pages are intact, but the dust jacket may be missing. Pages may include considerable notes or highlighting, but text must not be obscured.

Be conservative when assigning condition -— your customers will appreciate it. Nothing makes a buyer hap-pier than receiving a book in better condition than ex-pected. Other things being equal, used books advertised as “very good” seem to sell just as fast as those rated "like new." Maybe buyers figure that sellers who aren’t prom-ising perfection are probably more honest.

New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)

The key to selling books online: honest descriptions

Good condition is the key to salability of used and collectible books. For a rare book, the dust jacket can account for as much as 80 percent of its value as a collectible. So it’s best to pass up books that have major flaws like broken bindings and missing dust jackets. Buyers understand that a used book will show some wear, but nobody wants to receive a book that looks abused.

No matter how many precautions you take to warn a customers about a book’s defects, the risk is you’ll end up with an unhappy buyer who didn’t read the description or forgot the details. Many buyers on Amazon Marketplace, for example, do not notice the "seller’s comments" area of a book’s listing, the only place available to add details about condition.

Sometimes condition problems will escape your attention and the customer will receive a book with blank or missing pages, for example. Don’t be shocked if the customer accuses you of fraud. Lots of Marketplace buyers assume that if they buy a used book, you’ve just finished reading it. And so the reasoning goes, if you failed to mention the condition problem, you’re obviously untrustworthy.

Calmly explain that you weren’t aware of the flaw. Offer a full refund and a prepaid return mailing container. It’s part of the cost of doing business.

When you list new books for sale, it's a good time to spruce up their appearance. Thumb through the book carefully to look for highlighting or underlining. Light pencil marks can usually be completely erased with a quality eraser. Straighten any bent pages and remove any foreign objects like bookmarks and paper clips. Remove price tags from the cover. Sticker residue and most ink stains can be removed with a solvent like Goo-Gone.

Marketing your online bookstore with e-mail

The good news is that e-mail marketing is an effective, economical marketing engine for small book sellers. You can rent e-mail lists of qualified book buyers from list brokers, but the best source of e-mail addresses is your previous buyers.

A comprehensive resource on the topic is Internet Direct Mail by Robert W. Bly.

Be sure to provide a way for recipients to opt out of receiving your e-mails, you don’t want to be accused of sending spam. If you market your Web site with unsolic-ited e-mails, you’re required to comply the CAN-SPAM Act. The law requires advertising e-mails sent to someone you don’t have an existing business relationship with to:
 be identified as an advertisement
 have a valid return e-mail address
 have a legitimate subject heading
 Include an opt-out or unsubscribe provision, and
 Include your physical mailing address.




New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)

Selling books on your own Web site

Several vendors have pre-packaged solutions enabling booksellers to quickly open a store on their own Web site. By keeping customers at their own Web sites, seller can potentially pay commissions and lose fewer sales to competitors offering the same book for a few cents less.

To build their own store, a seller must first choose from two basic designs: a PC-administered system, or a Web-based administration. A Web-based store is usually easier to set up but it has less flexibility. By contrast, a PC-based store has a higher learning curve but can be more customized.

The danger is that if your vendor fails or goes out of business, your business can go down the tubes with it. With a Web-based store, your site will go down when your vendor’s site is down, and if the vendor goes out of business, your store might be lost for good. A PC-based store, however, could be switched to a different Internet host if necessary. Security is also better with PC sites since your customer data is stored offline.

The key to getting sales on your Web store is driving traffic there. Buyers won’t find your site unless you market it. Traffic coming from search engines such as Google is typically a major source of Web shoppers. A store admin-istered on your PC may show up better in search engine results if you can customize HTML meta-tags for each product page. Web-based stores don’t rank as high as PC-based stores with search engines, so your marketing may have to rely on e-mail.




New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)

More online bookselling venues: Halfvalue, Yahoo, Valorebooks

Halfvalue.com. A relative newcomer, Halfvalue got some buzz when eBay announced plans to close its Half.com site in 2004. Halfvalue imitates several themes from its larger rivals, including the "Half" name and Amazon's "Sell Yours Here" button and "A to Z" buyer guarantee.

Halfvalue sellers pay a 15 percent commission and 79 cent transaction fee on each sale. Funds are paid twice a month via Paypal. Volume sellers can choose to pay a $15 monthly subscription fee to avoid paying the 79-cent transaction fees, and may upload their inventory files electronically. Halfvalue seems to have attracted some sellers to the site but it remains to be seen if a critical mass of buyers is there.

Yahoo Stores. The pioneering Web portal has made steady progress with its Stores platform, and claims to host one of every eight new online stores. Three packages are offered, with the entry-level "Basic" store carrying a $39.95 monthly fee, a 1.5 percent transaction fee, and $50 setup fee. According to participating booksellers, the results have been mixed.

Valorebooks.com targets the college textbook market. Listings are free and sales incur a 15 percent commission.




New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)

More online bookselling venues: A1, TomFolio, UsedBookCentral

A1Books.com. A1 launched an online bookselling marketplace in 2004. The company is part of A1Overstock, a distributor of remainder books. The Web site is well designed and several big sellers are participating.

A1 Marketplace has about 2,000 sellers. Sellers pay a commission of 12 percent on sales, and proceeds from sales are transmitted to sellers via Paypal.

TomFolio.com was launched in 1999 as a platform for trading used, rare and collectible books, as well as ephemera and periodicals. The cooperative was designed as a refuge for independent sellers who wanted to operate free of corporate influence. The site especially appeals to specialist dealers.

TomFolio chages as monthly listing fee of $35 for up to 4,000 listings. The fee rises to $90 for sellers with more than 75,000. The company is organized as a cooperative.

BookAvenue.com is a site for dealers of out-of-print, used and rare books. The subscription fee ranges from $5 per month for up to 200 listings to $49.95 for more than 100,00 listings. The subscription fee is waived for the first three months.

UsedBookCentral.com charges a monthly fee based on the number of listings. For up to 25,000 listings the fee is $17.50 and for over 50,000 the fee is $37.50. Members receive a free home page with logos and custom text.




New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)

More online bookselling venues: ABE, Alibris, B&N

The Advanced Book Exchange was the first big online database for online booksellers in the 1990s. Its major competitor was Bibliofind, which was bought by Amazon. ABE says it has about 13,000 members with 70 million listings and 1.5 million registered buyers.

Just five years ago, more than 90 percent of online booksellers were ABE members. But with the advent of Amazon Marketplace, ABE now appears to control less than 25 percent of today’s seller corps.

ABE sellers pay a subscription fee of $25 monthly, and the fee rises based on the number of listings. Sellers with more than 500 listings pay $37 a month and the fee can go up to $300 for those with more than 15,000 listings. A commission of 8 percent of the book’s price is paid on each sale, up to a maximum of $40 per book. The minimum commission is 50 cents per book. If ABE processes the credit card transaction, a fee of 5.5 percent is due.

For buyers, the disadvantage of ABE is that it can provide an uneven shopping experience compared with standardized marketplaces like Amazon Marketplace and Half.com. Sellers may have their own shipping and return policies.

Alibris sellers pay a 15 percent commission on the sale of items priced under $500 and 10 percent on items over $500. Also, sellers are charged a minimum monthly subscription fee of $15, and the fee can rise to $150 a month for sellers with more than 100,000 listings. Alternatively, sellers can pay a $1 fee per item sold instead of the monthly subscription fee. The company also sells and warehouses some used books on its own.

One of the advantages of Alibris is that it allows sellers to target business and library customers. Alibris was spawned from BookQuest, an early business-to-business network for antiquarian book dealers.

Barnes & Noble is the second-largest online bookseller, though it trails Amazon by a huge margin. B&N has been experimenting with adding a third-party sellers platform like Amazon’s Marketplace. During 2004, ABE members could list used books for sale on its Web site. But the listings are pretty well hidden and B&N has a moratorium on new sellers. The situation bears watching. B&N is the leading brick-and-mortar book chain and could shake things up if it launched a real used book marketplace.




New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)