Postal Service upgrades Shipping Assistant software

The U.S. Postal Service released a new version of Shipping Assistant, its free desktop PC software that allows you to calculate postage and print labels.

New features in this release:

• Labels for domestic shipments, including shipments to APO/FPO addresses, with optional return labels.
• Labels for international shipments to every country served by U.S. Postal Service.
• Merchandise Return labels to include with outgoing merchandise (with return postage charged to your postage payment account).

Q&A: What's the fastest way to reprice books?

QUESTION: What's the best way to automatically update the prices of my listings? I'm still tweaking mine by hand, but I would like to set up a system where each listing's price is automatically matched with the lowest competing offer of same quality.

Christmas is just around the corner, and it would be great to be competitive. But tweaking 2000 plus listings by hand between now and Thanksgiving? No time for that, I am afraid...

Also, is there any way to exclude certain books from the automated updating, or will I have to update my entire database when I give the command?

ANSWER: Let's begin with Amazon. Of course you know about the Marketplace Open Listings page, where you can view your open listings and adjust prices. This is a pretty good tool for managing prices if your inventory is in the hundreds of books. This is a huge improvement over the days when I started selling six years ago, when you had to click through every Marketplace listing to see any prices.

You can also set your preferences on this page to display the lowest absolute price, or the lowest price for the same condition.

If you need to fully automate your repricing, there's lots of tools for it nowadays. I've listed the ones I'm familiar with here.

One product that's made especially for Amazon users is AMan, which offers a free 21-day trial. It does the kind of tasks you're talking about -- automated repricing with the ability to customize how it handles certain items in your inventory.

AMan was recently upgraded, and I tested and reviewed it for BookThink:

Repricing can mushroom into an unmanageable chore as your business grows larger. When I started selling on Amazon six years ago, there were no automation tools like this, so I had to scroll through Amazon's Web pages to update each of my prices.

AMan and a few of the others do some additional tasks for you, like printing packing slips and automating your postage printing.

The drawback with most of the seller software is you're charged a monthly fee. Several of them also want a cut of your Marketplace sales. There is one repricer I know of without a fee: Tooyen. This one is probably a lot easier to understand if you're already familiar with the basic idea of a spreadsheet because that's how you'll be viewing your listings and your prices in.

So here's the list, and and you know of one not listed, please add a comment below. If you have a favorite, let us know why.

Bookrouter enables booksellers to list their inventory on up to 19 online selling venues. It configures the data for each site and offers a way to adjust prices on different venues.

FillZ.com allows you to list on all the major sites and allows dynamic price adjustment for each site.

The Art of Books handles repricing, order fulfillment, postage printing, and other tasks across all the major venues.

SellerMagic. For Amazon sellers, a repricer that enables you to put selected competitors into a separate group.

BookSku. Another tool for Amazon sellers that enables you to automatically reprice your inventory.

Monsoon is a service targeted at larger sellers using Amazon Marketplace and six other bookselling venues.

Seller Engine is for Amazon sellers. I don't like recommending Seller Engine because they quit supporting software that I and many other Amazon sellers bought from them about four years ago.

Library thief caught selling rare books on eBay

An antiquarian book expert thought it looked too good to be true -- a 1654 volume of John Donne's poetry up for sale on eBay. And he was right, that book and over 400 others were stolen from Manchester Library in England -- busted!

The pilfered books included a 16th Century Chaucer edition valued at nearly $70,000.

Q&A: How do I deduct the cost of books that turn out worthless?

QUESTION: I'm collecting books to start selling online. I've bought books from family members, friends, yard sales, estate sales, thrift stores, etc. Most of these places don't have receipts, or the receipts don't say what was purchased.

What is the best way to go about keeping records for myself and for taxes? Also, how do I show losses for books I buy, but then discover they aren't worth anything?

ANSWER: Please keep in mind that I'm not an expert on taxes, so I'm really not qualified to give advice. So the advice here is worth about what you're paying for it ;-)

However, here's the way I've always handled it: You're right, it's impossible to keep track of the individual costs of books. The way I report my business to the IRS is "cash" accounting, which is the simplest way. I list (on the Schedule C in my long 1040 Form) all my expenses (books, postage, mailers, etc.). For the books I buy, it's all documented by the checks I've written at book sales (or credit card receipts). I don't account for the individual items. Total it up and that's your "cost of goods sold" for the year. You subtract that from the income from bookselling, and that's your profit, and that's what you pay taxes on.

So back to your question about "showing a loss" for books that turn out to be worthless: Under my simple system described above, they're already deducted since you've documented their cost and subtracted it already from your profit.

As far as keeping records, I have a checking account dedicated to my book business, and I download the transactions into Quicken, everything goes into a category. If you don't do something like that, I'd recommend keeping a journal of your expenses, so that even if you don't have a receipt, you'll have some documentation for the IRS in case you're ever audited.

Personally, I think the system I've described would satisfy the IRS if you're running a small home-based business. However, if you want complete peace of mind that you've got everything up to snuff, you could hire an accountant to do your taxes one year. Then you could follow that example in subsequent years fairly easily. The trick is to find someone who has experience doing taxes for people who have home-based businesses. If you end up with the wrong accountant it can be a real headache. Personal recommendations are a good way to find one.

Every online seller has a different way of handling their business. A couple of months ago when we brought up donating books for charitable deductions, the range of comments was amazing.

Amazon debuts Marketplace seller storefronts

Amazon has rolled out its Marketplace storefronts and sellers have noticed a few significant shortcomings.

The most glaring issue for most sellers is the default name displayed on their storefront. Instead of their seller nickname being displayed, it's sometimes the seller's actual name, such as "John Doe." Quite a few sellers are unhappy about that, since they don't want personal data out there on Amazon for everyone to see.

My storefront, for example, says simply "Steve," only half of my seller nickname. Why only half? Who knows.

The URLs for storefronts, though, still work the same as zShops: http://www.amazon.com/shops/SELLER_NICKNAME

There is a way to change the Marketplace storefront name: From your Seller Account, go to:

> Edit Your Marketplace Seller Profile.

You can change the name of your storefront by entering a "business name." If the "business name" box is blank, your seller nickname will appear on your storefront.

You might want to also check to see if your street address is displayed. Many sellers would rather not have this publicly viewable on Amazon.

Also, from your seller account, you can click:
>Edit your seller preferences -- This allows you to change the display of your "customer service policy" and "shipping methods."

One new feature: You can add a logo to your storefront. Fine.

A major weakness of the storefronts is there's no categories or search function. Customers aren't going to scroll through 5,000 listings to find books.

Amazon says it plans to add storefront categories for books at some point. And the sellers participating in Fulfillment by Amazon already have some sorting ability on their storefronts. Although there's no category browsing, you can sort by bestselling, newest arrivals, featured items, "on sale" and by price.

One obvious question for sellers: If books are listed in your storefront now, will categories magically appear sometime later, assigned by Amazon? Or will a system be phased in later, and sellers will have to work backwards, recategorizing all their previous listings? It's an important question for those sellers who are currently struggling to convert old zShops listings into Marketplace. If anybody knows the answer to this, they aren't talking.

What's your take on the new storefronts?

Q&A: How can I reprice my Amazon inventory using my Mac?

QUESTION: I am looking for a system to automate my price checking. I have a Mac, which can sometimes limit the choices of what is available.

I have always manually repriced my inventory, usually a page of listings a day, and it's getting harder to manage as my inventory increases.

ANSWER: I know the feeling. About five years ago, I had 10,000 unique books listed on Amazon, and there was no seller software available. Repricing took me about four days and gave me eye strain, carpal tunnel, and a sore butt.

Now there's lots of seller software on the market, and fortunately there's some options for Mac users too.

We will assume you're an Amazon Pro-Merchant, which gives you access to the listings reports that enable you to automate many tasks.

There's two options for Mac users as far as seller software goes. (If there are more recent additions, hopefully someone will add a comment and enlighten us.)

There's a free repricer called Tooyen. Basically you download your open listings, Tooyen suggests an optimal price, and you review the prices, change them if necessary, and upload the spreadsheet to Amazon.

There's a Web-based seller service called The Art of Books.

The Art of Books has many more features than Tooyen but you pay a monthly fee for using it. It's Web based, so you could use it to reprice, then I think you'd need to import that into your spreadsheet and upload the file to Amazon. Here's their forum for Mac users.

When we talk about downloading and uploading the Amazon Open Listing report, it's a service they call "Inventory Loader." You can also use it to add or delete listings, or change prices or quantities. Here's a tutorial on Amazon's site.

If you're already familiar with using Microsoft Excel (or any spreadsheet software) it will be a tremendous help and your learning curve won't be so bad. If you don't have a spreadsheet program, here's a free software suite that I've been using for about the past six months with wonderful results: OpenOffice. It has a full suite of programs and includes a word processor. It looks like Microsoft Office, but works better, if you ask me. And it's multi-platform and free. The spreadsheet program you'll be using with your open listings report is called "Calc."

Q&A: How valuable is this children's book?

QUESTION: I found a children's paperback in a bag of books I bought at a thrift store. I looked it up for fun because it didn't look like anything special (plus, it's not in great shape). Anyway, it seems it runs for $200 and up. That doesn't make sense to me, but I don't want to underprice it. It's called Treasure in the Stream--The Story of a Gold Rush Girl. It's by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, Pictures by Nancy Carpenter. I would list it as Good, it's not an ex-library. Can you give me some suggestions as to where to look next to see if that's really what it's worth?

ANSWER: Unfortunately, I think in this case the book isn't really valuable but it's been mispriced by one of the sellers and the other sellers are meeting the same price without doing research. I was able to find several other copies of the book that aren't high-priced, so it doesn't seem to be really collectible.

Here's an earlier printing with much lower pricing.

The reason for the high prices on the 1993 copies, I think, is one or more of the sellers is a drop-shipper. They price most (or all) of their books artificially high, then when they get an order, they have it sent by another seller and the cheaper price and they pocket the difference.

I don't think there's much danger of anyone having to fill this order, though. If you do a Google search on this title, there's a lot of Web pages about it being used in schools to teach about California history -- in that case the book is a lot more common than the online listings would make it appear. The book probably isn't rare, it's just that nobody is bothering to list it.

Looks like the same listings are on Half.com.

However, on AddAll I found a listing in the UK for over $600. And most of the prices are over $35.

OK, now I'm curious. Which are the crazy sellers, the ones on Amazon and Half, or ABE and Alibris?

Amazon postpones deleting zShops listings, plans solution for non-UPC products

Amazon has given its Pro-Merchant sellers a reprieve by providing another six weeks before zShops listings are deleted.

zShops are scheduled to be phased out on Oct. 24, and listings won't be visible to buyers after then. But sellers will have another six weeks after Oct. 24 to migrate the ir zShop listings to Amazon Marketplace, before the listings are deleted permenantly from seller accounts.

In an e-mail announcing the six-week extension, Amazon also described a pilot program to allow sellers to create Marketplace listings for Music, Video, and DVD products without UPC codes. Currently those products are listed mainly in zShops.

Information in the e-mail hasn't been posted to Amazon's Web site, so I'm posting the message in its entirety here, for those who haven't received it. As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 16:31:55 -0700
From: "Amazon.com" Subject: Reminder: zShops Changes Happening on October 24th!

Dear zShops sellers,

We would like to kindly remind all Pro Merchant sellers who have zShops listings about the October 24, 2006 date for migrating your listings over to Marketplace (see our previous announcement for details).

There are also recent developments which you should be aware of which occurred as a result of the feedback we have received about this change:

1) Timeframe extension for availability of zShops listings to sellers.
2) Solution for sellers who have zShops listings for Music, Video, and DVD products without UPC codes.
3) Your Storefront URL will remain the same.

1. Timeframe Extension:

We are extending the availability of your zShops listings in your zShops account by 6 weeks, from October 24, 2006, to December 5, 2006. This extension will allow you to continue to have reference to your zShops listings while you re-list them in Marketplace, though buyers will not be able to view your zShops listings during that time.

In the evening on October 24, 2006, the following will still occur:

* Your new Storefront featuring your Marketplace listings will replace your zShops Storefront.
* Buyers will no longer be able to view your zShops listings.
* You will no longer be able to create zShops listings.

2. Solution for sellers who have zShops listings for Music, Video, and DVD products without UPC codes.

In addition to Books (ISBN and pre-ISBN), products in Music, Video, and DVD categories without UPC codes represent the overwhelming majority of products listed in zShops today. To address this gap in Marketplace, we are launching a pilot program to allow sellers to list Music, Video, and DVD products without a UPC code. During this pilot, we will monitor the creation of the non-UPC product pages to ensure a good buyer experience before continuing or extending the program to other sellers.

At this time, the program's participants are sellers who are currently selling Music, Video, and DVD products in zShops and who have a high feedback rating. Sellers who were registered by Amazon to participate in the program will be receiving a separate e-mail with instructions on how they can use the Create Product Detail Page feature to add Music products without UPC codes. The ability to create pages for Video and DVD products without UPCs will follow soon after.

Sellers who meet the criteria above and who have over 80 listings in those categories will be offered bulk migration assistance.

If you are a seller who meets the criteria above, but you have not received an e-mail with instructions by October 24, 2006, please send an e-mail to zshops-changes-feedback@amazon.com with the subject line "Pilot program."

3. Your Storefront URL will remain the same.

Following feedback regarding the change of the Storefront URL from www.amazon.com/shops/ to www.amazon.com/stores/, we have decided to accommodate the many sellers who actively market their URL link and leave the URL for the new Storefront as: www.amazon.com/shops/.

How can I learn more?

You can learn more about selling in Amazon Marketplace, what you need to do to migrate your listings, and more about your new Storefront by going to our Help pages. Click "Help" from the Amazon.com home page, and then click Selling at Amazon.com > zShops.

If you have any additional feedback, please feel free to send an e-mail message to zshops-changes-feedback@amazon.com.

Thank you for selling at Amazon.com!

Q&A: How do you automate Endicia for postage printing?

QUESTION: You had mentioned that you use Endicia for its speed. I downloaded the trial program and found it slow-going. I open Amazon's pack slip page and print that to pull my orders with. While there, I copy the order number and address information and paste that into the MS Word label window and print that label on an Eltron direct thermal printer.

My dilemma with Endicia is that when you have the pack slip page open you can cut and paste the address info into the address section in DAZzle, but until you have the book pulled and packed, you don't know the weight and postage amount.

With this being the case, my only option is to process a single order at a time. What am I doing wrong?

ANSWER: There's a couple of ways to do this faster. First, you can import your buyer names and addresses into DaZzle. (For this you'd need a database of your day's orders from your Pro-Merchant fulfillment report.) By typing the first few letters of the addressee, Dazzle will highlight that name and address. If you have a scale hooked up to your computer, you can let DaZzle grab the weight.

About a year ago I switched to a faster way of doing this, by building an XML file of my day's orders. I'd gotten the idea by seeing Endicia's Tarantula program, which can print your postage label and packing slip on one laser-printed integrated form. You peel off the label and slap it on the package, and the paper goes inside as the packing slip.

Unfortunately, using Tarantula requires an Endicia "professional" account, which costs $34.95 a month. I didn't want to pay that, so I rigged up my own way of generating an XML file using my order database and a Microsoft Word form letter as a stylesheet.

I have to manually input the weights of the books into my database, but most of my books are one or two pounds. Once I've got my XML file ready, I just tell Endicia to print it, and all my postage and packing slips are done by pressing one button.

Many of the third-party seller software enables automated postage printing, if you don't feel like rigging up your own system.

Here's Endicia's XML specifications.

And here some other advanced info on Endicia.

Q&A: How big can I build an online bookselling business?

QUESTION: I own more than 300,000 books already, and I'm building a business at home. How many books can one person list, sell, package, and ship on their own? In other words, assuming I have all the latest technology, how big can I make my business? A 75,000-book inventory? Fifty thousand? How big should I build?

ANSWER: That's an interesting question. It all depends on the person, and there's so many variables. I think it depends largely on how well you're able to get your hands on good inventory and organize and automate your business.

Some people would be overwhelmed with more than a few thousand of books in inventory. On the other hand, I'm sure some sole proprietors working solely on their own could handle 25,000 in inventory.

I have always been a sole proprietor. I've never been against the idea of hiring help, but I've never felt it was necessary for me. At my busiest (about 1.5 years ago) I had about 11,000 hand-picked used books listed on Amazon, and was selling about 100 each day. That's probably better volume and cashflow than lots of brick-and-mortar used bookshops have.

I probably worked 10 to 12 hours a day six days a week when my inventory was that high, so that was my max. Each workday included a few hours per day finding and hand-picking used books and listing them, primarily on Amazon. Since then, I've also gotten into selling new books. The great thing about selling new books is, you can list and sell multiple quantities of the same book. The trick is to avoid buying tons of the wrong books, and getting stuck with dead inventory.

So I'd say there's three critical things to having a one-person home-based bookstore with high volume:

1. Access to inventory. Sounds like you've got this covered. So this could potentially give you more time to devote to other parts of the business and get your volume up.

2. Organization. You need to minimize the time you spend on repetitive tasks. One way to do this is to have an SKU system, where each book has a unique number affixed to it with a sticker. I learned the value of this after I'd been selling for about six months. Until then, I'd organized my books alphabetically, A to Z. After I got a few thousand books in stock, it started taking me a few minutes to find each book and make sure it was the right one. I realized pretty quickly I was wasting lots of time picking my way through the alphabet for every book. I eliminated this wasted time by switching to an SKU system, which ended up saving me multiple hours per day after my business grew larger.

3. Automation. The two big things here are automating your price checking, to make sure your inventory is priced competitively, and having a system that automates the printing of your packing slips and postage. For example, I built a system to print my postage/address labels/packing slips in one batch each day. That saves a huge amount of time.

One other thing I changed that eliminated some wasted time and expense was switching to jiffy mailers for books worth less than $10. Until then I'd used cardboard bookfolds to mail any book, no matter how cheap it was.

Q&A: My book listing was incorrect and sold, what now?

QUESTION: I sold a book, and when packing it noticed that Amazon indicates it's a hardcover, but my copy is a softcover with the same ISBN. I e-mailed the buyer through Amazon and directly to ask if she wanted to buy it anyway or get a refund. She hasn't responded and it's been over 24 hours. I advertise next-day shipping. She's in Australia. It's a $15 textbook. Some of the other listings specify paperback and some don't say.

Would you tell the buyer?

ANSWER: It's either an error in Amazon's catalog, or the publisher re-used the ISBN. I wouldn't lose too much sleep on this one.

Just print out your e-mail where you explained things and enclose it. Tell the customer you're fairly confident this is the book she's expecting but if not you're happy to refund, etc. If you're giving a free upgrade to Global Priority you can probably afford to wait another day on this one.

But absolutely, I'd point out the discrepancy. Buyers can be extremely unforgiving if they suspect they're being conned.

Good luck!

Barnes & Noble targets Amazon Marketplace

Regular readers of this blog will recall my previous post about Barnes & Noble's plans for starting a used-book marketplace similar to Amazon Marketplace.

Like most online booksellers, I'm interested in expanding my business. Hey, competition is as American as Uncle Pie.
So I applied on the Barnes & Noble's Bookquest Web site as soon as I found out about this in June. But I'd nearly forgotten about it when, today, I got an e-mail from sellerrelations@barnesandnoble.com to let me know, by golly, the application for my seller account had been approved. Hot Diggity!!!

To be honest, I was a bit scared that this was a scam. Seriously, I've gotten so much spam lately. I'd even forgotten what my "password" was. Not only that, I'd personally asked BN.com's management to keep me updated on this program, so I could write about it ON MY BLOG ABOUT SELLING BOOKS ONLINE.

But I never heard diddly, which made me fairly nervous about plugging in my checking account number on the dag-goned Web site.

But I did it anyway, and here's the answer I got via e-mail:

Dear Weber Books,

Congratulations, your application has been approved and your Barnes & Noble Authorized Seller Account is ready to be activated. To activate your account, please click on the link below, or copy and paste the URL into your browser, and sign in:

After you have signed in, you will be asked to read and accept our Seller Agreement. Once you accept the Seller Agreement, your account will be activated. When you receive an email confirming that your account is active, you can begin selling on Barnes & Noble.com. The email will contain instructions on how to log on to your Store Manager, which contains the online tools that you need to manage your business on Barnes & Noble.com. Thank you for applying to become a Barnes & Noble Authorized Seller. We look forward to working with you in the future.

https://secure.barnesandnoble.com/sellers/activate/

Sincerely,
Barnes & Noble Seller Relations
Email: sellerrelations@bookquest.com
Telephone: 866-897-1763
Hours of Operation: 9AM - 8:30PM (ET), Monday through Friday

Here's the fine print. Here's the signup page.

Anyone else get this e-mail? Please, for Heaven's sakes, don't let me be the only one. I need to buy groceries tomorrow.

I've already listed some books. And I'll be sure to update this post when Barnes & Noble updates this section of my new seller account:

Feedback manipulation at Amazon.com

I just received an interesting e-mail from my friend Christine, who's a home-schooling mother and a frequent buyer on Amazon Marketplace.

Last month Christine placed a Marketplace order that was never filled by the seller, with no explanation. Christine left negative feedback, and now the seller is offering to send a "free" book -- but only if Christine removes the negative feedback.

Is this unethical? It surely seems that way to Christine. Here's a snippet from her e-mail, and you can get the full rundown here on her blog, The Thinking Mother:

I feel that this seller's practices should be against the rules, if they are not already. I feel that trust is important, and that this seller is in the wrong. I would love to know that ethical Amazon Marketplace sellers do not endorse this practice.

I think this case points out two important things:

1. Once you get below 95 percent feedback, it *can be* a warning sign. I am sure there are many reputable sellers who have feedback below that -- especially if you have employees helping to run your business whose livelihood isn't directly dependent on buyer feedback.

However, most online sellers with high ethics will attempt to fix every problem, no matter who's at fault -- it's just the way they operate. And so when you start getting below 95 percent, I think you could also have a situation where there's a percentage of buyers who didn't complain when they got the shaft -- either because they can't be bothered, or they forgot about the order. Who knows, they might even be embarrassed at having been "ripped off," lots of people who get swindled never report it to the police, they're ashamed. OK, maybe I'm over-dramatizing. The point is, the actual level of service provided by sellers with suspect feedback could be worse than it appears.

2. I know that Amazon will suspend or close a seller account if they suspect "feedback manipulation." And I'll explain just how I know this: Every time I get a negative feedback, I'll offer the customer a carrot to delete their negative feedback. To give a typical case, sometimes I'll get a negative feedback like "1/5 - Slow! Book took four weeks to arrive!"

My usual response to the customer will be, "I'll refund your shipping fee of $3.49 if you'll delete the negative feedback." If it was a really cheap book sometimes I'll offer to refund in full. And of course I'll point out that I shipped promptly, it was the Postal Service that was slow. For really clueless customers, sometimes I'll explain a bit more, gently telling them their negative rating is actually defeating the whole purpose of feedback, which is to warn buyers of slipshod sellers, not those who bend over backwards making things right.

Anyway, I've done this probably 200 times since Amazon began allowing customers to remove negative feedback a couple of years ago. One time, however, a customer complained to Amazon about my doing this (talk about hard to deal with!) and I received an e-mail from Amazon, warning me about "feedback manipulation." Apparently some of the folks at Amazon believe that any time you offer a special deal in exchange for feedback deletion, it's "feedback manipulation" -- something you tend to hear more about in regards to eBay, not Amazon.

Maybe "feedback manipulation" came up because of what my customer said to Amazon, which I didn't see. The case I'm thinking of also involved an A to Z claim (the anonymous kind), so maybe that's why it got more scrutiny.

In the case Christine brings up, however, I must agree it's a shady practice. It's bribery because the seller is trying to cover up something. So participating in the cover up would be a definite disservice to the Marketplace, and work against the purpose of feedback. What's your take?

Google Base Store Connector uploads your Amazon, eBay store listings

Was it a rude coincidence, or did Google schedule the coming-out party for its Google Base Store Connector during the same month as Amazon's zShops funeral on purpose?

Google's free software allows you to upload the contents of your Amazon zShop or Marketplace listings to Google Base, which displays all types of products. You can also upload listings from eBay or Yahoo stores.

Not too many people know about Google Base yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more familiar pretty quickly.

A free selling platform like Google Base will get lots of attention with sellers unhappy with the current state of affairs at Amazon and eBay. There's certainly unrest among Pro-Merchants, and discontent at eBay is palpable.

I downloaded the Google Base Store Connector this morning, and it's completely foolproof. All I had to do to upload my listings was enter the name of my eBay Store and the URL of my zShop. However, to add my Marketplace listings, I had to enter my Amazon seller e-mail and my Amazon password (see my screenshot below). I hesitated for a minute, but got more comfortable after reading the fine print -- that the password wouldn't leave my PC.

I'm not ready to endorse Google Base yet, it still has three huge drawbacks:

No standardized checkout. Just to see how it worked, I began the checkout system with one merchant, and it gave no indication of how the payment would be processed (PayPal, or what?) or even how much the shipping fee would be. Sorry, Jack, that just doesn't cut it. I'm not saying everyone on the Web has to use the same checkout cart, but you're at least going to have to tell me who's looking at my credit card number.

No seller feedback system, therefore no way for buyers to have confidence they'll receive prompt and accurate service.

No automate updates to your inventory. Google's software doesn't update your listings, so if one of your books sells elsewhere, you'll need to update things with Google each time, using the software.

The bottom line is, it just doesn't look like a marketplace. Buyers won't get it.

However, Google could fix all these problems quickly, and turn Base into the ultimate nightmare for eBay and Amazon. Suppose Google starts allowing merchants to automatically offer Google Checkout, the search engine's alternative to PayPal? It seems to be the next logical step for Google.

It seems there's not many transactions happening at Google Base right now. But make no mistake, Google can deliver millions of buyers, simply by flipping a switch. It's already sending thousands of buyers every minute of the day to Amazon and eBay, when they search for a book title or other product.

And what's to prevent Google from sending all those searchers to Google Base instead of Amazon or eBay? Nothing.

I'm not the first brainiac to think of this: Google plans to start funneling product searches to Base in December, just in time for holiday sales.

Q&A: Is Amazon cycling off my listings?

QUESTION: I have been a Pro-Merchant seller on Amazon for over a year now, and my inventory has grown steadily. I am now up to around 18,000 items, and sales for the past couple of months have been really bad.

Is this a trend? Is Amazon hurting us by their technical gaffes? Is it a possible search engine issue with the buyers? Are there just too many sellers on Amazon today?

It seems odd that I'm averaging 30-40 books sold per day with an inventory of 18,000, yet last winter I had an inventory of 5000-6000 and was selling 40-50 per day. Does Amazon cycle their sellers?

ANSWER: Three issues always dog Amazon sellers:

• Seasonality - August and January are the biggest months by far for sales. I have nearly triple the volume in those two months.
  
  
• Age of your listings - Your best items tend to sell very quickly, then the stuff that there's not much demand for sits on the shelf indefinitely. The longer you've been in business, the more old listings you have, so the percentage of your items that sell on a daily basis declines. And it can decline very low unless you clean out your "deadwood" periodically. A few years ago when space started getting tight for me, I started ruthlessly going through my stock and trashing anything that had been listed for, say, two years and the current price was less than $20. This is a time-consuming process.
  
  
• Amazon's site instability. There are definitely periods when there's clearly something wrong at Amazon, whether it's the payments system not functioning right, or the listings just aren't showing up. I haven't ever believed that there's a plan at Amazon to reduce the visibility of the Marketplace listings. They make a huge percentage of profit on Marketplace sales and there's no inventory or personnel costs for Amazon, so it makes no sense for them to put up roadblocks to Marketplace sales.

Having said all that, I often think there's a conspiracy of incompetence at Amazon that gets in the way of sales. For example, a Marketplace seller like you or me will notice something malfunctioning on the site and will try to bring this to the technical department's attention, and there's no way to do it.

I've said it several times, and I'll say it again: Amazon has the world's largest consulting team (Pro-Merchant sellers) working for them free, 24/7 -- the kind of support that would be impossible to buy. We're continually troubleshooting their business and reporting the problems, and nobody's listening. To put it mildly, this is not a smart business practice.

We're making a huge amount of money for Amazon. If the company is going to survive for the next decade or so, Amazon will probably need to learn to listen to its third-party sellers.

I've noticed recently that my sales have been horrible on some days and other days, sales are very strong. For example, my sales on this past Saturday were double the volume of any previous day that week. That's the exact opposite of the way things should be, and that tells me something's seriously wrong. I suspect that it's related to all the changes Amazon is trying to do right now:

• killing zShops
• rolling out aStores
• new affiliate programs and affiliate stores

Those are the major things, and there's probably a dozen other issues.

I've always done about 90 percent to 95 percent of my sales on Amazon, I've sold far less on Half.com and eBay. I've never tried selling on the other networks like ABE.com or Alibris. With such a large inventory, you might look at that as an option for getting your sales velocity up.

Another thing I've noticed over the years is I lose about 5 percent of my inventory a year from Amazon -- it just disappears for some unknown reason. In other words, if you're using Amazon's open listings reports to manage your inventory, some of it could have disappeared from Amazon's system, you might have a couple thousand items that aren't listed on Amazon and that can certainly hurt your volume.

Tool converts ISBNs from 10-digit format to 13 digits

SkuFlow launched a tool enabling booksellers to convert their 10-digit ISBNs to the 13-digit format. The switch will occur in 2007, when book publishers will begin using 13-digit ISBNs instead of the 10-digit system in use since the 1970s. Booksellers may need to convert ISBNs of their existing books to 13 digits in certain cases.

The tool converts up to 12,000 ISBNs to the new ISBN-13 (EAN) format at once.

The program is Honor Ware, which means that the program is open to the public for use and users are asked to pay a $14.99 conversion fee. You can copy and paste your ISBNs and select either .txt, .csv, or .xls output. The tool provides alerts for bad ISBNs.

Here's more information on the changeover to 13-digit ISBNs.