Is it possible to walk into a used bookstore, spend $100 on 10 books, and resell them on Amazon or eBay for $350 or more?
Yes, and it’s getting easier than ever, thanks to cellphone price-lookup services like Scoutpal. Punch in a book’s ISBN from its back cover, and these services will tell you the going price on Amazon Marketplace within a few seconds.
You’ll pay about $15 to $40 a month for a subscription to one of these price-lookup services. That sounds pretty steep, until you figure it can double the profitability of your selling operation.
These price-lookup services will also help you find bargain-priced music CDs, DVDs, VHS videos, software, and video games.
Three recent innovations have made these pricing services a lot more effective and easy to use:
1. Integrated barcode scanners. If your cellphone has little keys and you have big thumbs, you’ll appreciate having a scanner hooked up to your cellphone. Scanning the barcode is a lot faster than typing in the 10-digit ISBN.
2. “Buyers Waiting” flags. Just because the Marketplace price is $25 doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll sell your item promptly for $25. But if there’s already a pending order on Amazon’s Buyers Waiting List, you can sell immediately if you meet the buyer’s specified price and condition. ScoutPal and ASellerTool tell you the value of any pending orders on Amazon, in addition to the Marketplace price.
3. “Unplugged” price-lookups. One of the newest innovations, MediaScouter, even eliminates the need for a cellphone connection. With MediaScouter, you simply scan the barcode, then use cached data you’ve downloaded to your PDA from the Internet. You configure MediaScouter to your preferences (for example, you might say a book worth $25 on Amazon is an automatic “buy”), and the unit gives you a corresponding beep for buy, or no-buy.
Here’s more cellphone price-lookup services:
Bookhero. www.bookhero.com
AsellerTool. www.asellertool.com
BookScout. www.theoldbookstore.com
BookDabbler. www.bookdabbler.com
Related posts:
![[Google]]( http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/wp-content/plugins/easy-adsenser/google-light.gif)
2 Comments
Steve,
Do any of these set-ups work with pre-ISBN books? Can you look up books that do not have a number?
Thanks.
~ Elaine
Hi Elaine,
For pre-ISBN books, ScoutPal will give you results from ABEbooks.com if you have the LCCN, Library of Congress Control Number, from the book. But that’s not really helpful in my opinion, I don’t sell on ABE anyway.
The wireless phone I use is a T-Mobile Sidekick — the good thing about it is it has a Web browser and keyboard. So for older books I’m thinking of buying, I’ll do an advanced book search on Amazon’s regular Web site (author name/title) to see what I can find.
If the book looks interesting and I’m only paying $1 or so for it, I won’t even bother looking it up — it takes up too much time, so I’ll just take my chances on the book. It’s more fun that way too.