Q&A: What software should I use for selling books on eBay?

QUESTION: I sell books primarily on eBay, listing books worth more than $10 in my Store. For less valuable books, I auction them for two seven-day periods, then the unsold books go into the store. When there is a promotion, I put almost all the expensive books on "live."

Each book is scanned and "written" up through eBay's Seller Assistant Pro software. I also list about 400 of my more expensive books on Amazon. This is very time-consuming, and Sellers Assistant Pro is being retired by eBay, which is going to require lots of relearning.

Is there a better way? eBay's ISBN listings are erratic, and many titles miss pertinent keywords. But eBay still provides a great venue for sales -- many times I'm the only seller with a certain title listed.

ANSWER: You can also use eBay's TurboLister software to list auctions, fixed-price core listings, and Store items. After you input an ISBN, TurboLister also allows you to change the book title, just in case you want to add a keyword or ensure the author name isn't cut off.

TurboLister allows you to quickly relist any group of auctions (or fixed-price listings) with the click of one button. You just highlight the ones you want to relist.

TurboLister is free, but it does have its idiosyncrasies. If you need more automation, you might want to look at the new version of eBay's Blackthorne software, which is supposed to improve the migration from Seller's Assistant.

Another option is considering third-party software that would enable you to automate your inventory management on eBay, Amazon, and the other major bookselling sites. These services manage your listings and delete the ones that sell, so you don't sell the same book twice. Here's a list of these tools hosted by eBay.

Of course these services will cost you a monthly fee and sometimes a percentage of your sales. But if it gets you a lot more cashflow it might be worth it.

On eBay, start low to sell high

When I auction books on eBay, I always start them at a penny, no reserve. Why? My gut tells me bidders are drawn to auctions that already have lots of bids. And the best way to get bids is to start your auction at a penny.

Sure, I've taken a pounding on several auctions where the book sold for 1 cent. But I've also sold several books for more than the cover price after a bidding war ensued.

The eggheads at the Kellogg School of Management agree with me. In a psychological study, the authors document:

"... How and why, in the social setting of auctions, lower starting prices result in higher final prices. Three processes contribute to this effect. First, lower starting prices reduce barriers to entry, which increase traffic and generate higher final prices. Second, lower prices entice bidders to invest time and energy (creating sunk costs) and, consequently, escalate their commitments. Third, the traffic generated by lower starting prices can lead bidders to infer value in the item, thereby explaining previous findings that traffic begets more traffic."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

How about it? Is this ivory tower thinking, or reality?

Tired of book scouting? Print them yourself!

Have you ever wished you could be the exclusive seller of a hot book -- by printing them yourself?

Well, this seller did just that, and made quite a few bucks at it -- until Amazon and eBay pulled the plug.

The seller downloaded a free e-book by business guru Seth Godin and printed hundreds of paperback copies. Sales were so good, Amazon began recommending the book to customers who purchased similar books, and one of those recommendations made its way back to Seth, who promptly blew his stack.


Hey, it's almost as easy as Xeroxing $20 bills, without those nagging counterfeiting accusations ;-)

Actually, the seller didn't violate any laws in this case. More details on my other blog.

eBay has a bright idea: Recommendations

What's the biggest difference between bookselling on Amazon and eBay? The way I look at it, it's recommendations.

The No. 1 driver of sales on Amazon is keyword searches -- buyers looking for a title or author name. No. 2 is recommendations.

Amazon creates demand for us, and that's why we pay 15 percent for our Marketplace sales. Amazon's customer base and its recommendations (in e-mails and on the Web site) result in tons of sales. The downside is, we depend on the customer figuring out what they want. Then they find us.

The flip side of this is eBay. On eBay, sellers have more license to create demand. The downside, of course, is you've got to work to make those sales. eBay knows a lot about sellers on its site, but it doesn't know much about the buyers.

Now eBay is taking a page from Amazon, and is paying people to write product reviews and it's developing a recommendation engine like Amazon's.

Netflix has had great success in recommending movies, much like Amazon recommends books. But will recommendations work on eBay? The software engineer who developed a recommendation system for Amazon Auctions, Greg Linden, has his doubts. As he recalls, Amazon pulled the plug on auction recommendations years ago because:

[I]t generated complaints from sellers who did not like competitors' items shown next to theirs.

I can already hear the howls of protest on the eBay boards once this feature is rolled out. But it appears eBay honchos have already decided it will increase sales, and they're going ahead.

How is bookselling on eBay going for you these days, and what's your take on auction recommendations?

Q&A: How often should I reprice my books?

QUESTION: What is the best frequency for repricing? I used to do it every two or three months, then monthly. Now I do it every two weeks, and I still don't know what interval is best. I drop prices just a penny below the lowest matching my condition. What have you found to be the ideal timing?

ANSWER: That's a tough question, and there are countless ways to approach it.

No seller likes to lower their price, but sometimes it's necessary if you realistically expect to make a sale. Sometimes your repricing chores can pay off nicely -- when you find an opportunity to raise your price.

At one point I repriced at least once a day, usually twice. Nowadays I probably reprice once every couple of months. I have never sat down to figure out which is the most profitable. Sometimes I sell my books at a higher price because I haven't chased the price down -- and the market price eventually comes back up to where I've been sitting. On the other hand, sometimes my books become totally worthless -- and maybe I could have gotten a sale, but now I have junk that will never sell.

Sometimes I use automated repricing for books worth less than $10 or $20, but I usually take the time to individually consider price changes for books worth more. The higher the price, the more likely the buyer will consider factors other than price -- like feedback. Especially for these pricier books, you need to go with your gut instinct: Will demand for the book probably rise, or fall?

My hunch is it probably doesn't hurt to lower your price at penny or so at a time to keep your visibility -- as long as it doesn't eat up other time that you could be devoting to getting new stock, etc.

However, by lowering by "a penny or so at a time," I don't think it's smart to use software to lower your price by a pennies several times a day. For example, I was recently watching one book on Marketplace where there is a short supply of used copies, and the book normally sells for around $18. There were two sellers battling to have the lowest price. They were lowering their price by 6 cents each time -- every several minutes! It had to be automated repricing. The point is, over the course of an afternoon they chased the price down almost $3 until one of the copies sold. The price went right back up, so one of those seller left $3 on the table. That's just one example I happened to see with my own eyes. I'm sure there's lots of cases where automated price-cutting is leaving a ton of money on the table for some sellers.

Does anyone else care to share their strategy on optimal repricing?

Finally, a romance novel worth investing in...

I remember early on in my online bookselling career, when I happened upon a huge crate of mint-condition Harlequin romance paperbacks priced at 10 cents apiece. I bought the whole lot, and thought I'd just won the lottery!

Some of those books sold for a few dollars, but most of them collected dust. Overall, I decided the whole experience was a pain in the butt, and I've never bought another romance novel since.

But that doesn't mean you can't make money selling romance, if you know what you're doing. Just because a book is mass-market fiction doesn't mean it's not a collectible -- or that it won't be someday.

Take, for example, this new book by Jayne Ann Krentz, White Lies. It's No. 4 on the New York Times' hardcover fiction list and at about 500 in Amazon Sales Rank.

Krentz isn't your run-of-the-mill romance novelist, her forte is paranormal tales. And because she's unique, her fans just love to collect her books. If you can get to your local Barnes & Noble or any other shop this weekend and find a First Printing of her new one, I'd snatch it. Don't bother buying on Amazon, they're probably stocking the third of fourth printing by now.

Here's why I'm going out on a limb about this book: Take a look at the Marketplace used prices for her previous books. Many of the paperbacks are selling for more than $150. And check this out: someone has a reading copy listed for $4,300. Holy Moly!

Now, how much will a First Edition of White Lies be worth 20 years from now? It's anyone's guess. Much of it will depend on the size of the First Printing, and I have no idea about that. But who knows, maybe Ms. Krentz will come to your town for a bookstore appearance this spring, and you could get your copy signed.

Krentz has written using several pseudonyms, so you might want to check those too. She writes historical romances using the pen name Amanda Quick, and she's also written some futuristic romance using her given name, Jayne Castle. She says she uses the different names to give her readers a quick idea as to what type of book it will be.

Q&A: Should I ignore books that sell online for less than $10?

QUESTION: My business model is simply to avoid buying books that sell for less than $10. Though this has worked well for me and I'm bringing in a steady income, I wonder if I'm missing out on some profit.

I've considered lowering my minimum price to $5 or $6. But even assuming I'm only paying about $1 per book, I wonder if this is worth the time and effort. I don't want to invest hundreds of dollars only to make a small return. However, I have plenty of storage space and time to work on my business.

ANSWER: I agree in principle with your notion of ignoring books worth less than $10, but I think you've set the bar a bit too high. Lots of people would probably disagree with me, but...

I think you should experiment with making your cutoff $6 or $7 instead of $10.

Here's the way I look at it: Say I'm at a library sale, and I spend 30 minutes there. I find five books worth an average of $20 apiece. All of the books are priced at around $1 or $2, so of course I snap up those gems in a heartbeat. Assuming I sell them all for about $20 apiece, I've earned a profit of about $100. Not bad.

And, let's say, at the same sale I come across another 10 books worth an average of $6 apiece. Let's say I'm buying those for $1 apiece, so assuming I sell them all, my profit margin (before listing fees or commissions) is $5 apiece. So, I've picked up an additional $50 worth of stock. I'm going to end up with 50 percent more profit without much more time or expense -- my time spent traveling to the sale and the transportation costs were spent already.

So I'm willing to snag those "commodity" books when that's the best option I see. And this gets to the real weakness of selling used books online as a business: The supply is finite -- there's only a certain amount of opportunity. Online bookselling is not something to get rich at, but the other side of the coin is, it's extremely low-risk and easy to start on a dime.

If you were willing to go to the trouble, you could analyze exactly how profitable this part of your business (lower priced commodity books) is for you. I've done this several times myself to judge how profitable certain inventory sources were for me, although I've never done it to analyze the effects of selling price alone. My tracking mechanism is to assign an SKU suffix to all the books in the category I'm considering. For example, I'll add an X to the end of all the SKUs for the category of books I want to track, so their SKUs are 1X, 2X, 3X, etc. Then when I want to run the numbers, I search for sales containing that SKU suffix and compare the sum of the sales to how much cash I've spent acquiring those books. How do I determine success or failure? Generally, I want to double my cash within a certain number of weeks.

Having said all this, these days I am ruthless about getting rid of low-value books that don't sell after a couple of years, and that adds considerably to the labor involved in this. Also, I've raised my bar considerably since I started selling six years ago. I remember when I'd be tickled to death to sell a book for $6.

Q&A: Can I sell my unwanted books in a bulk lot on eBay?

QUESTION: I'm considering selling my deadwood books on eBay as a bulk lot. Do you have any insight on this practice?

ANSWER: I tried this once a few years ago and didn't get a single bid, so I haven't tried it since. However, I've bought several dozen bulk lots of used books on eBay, and there's even a separate category for it: Books, Wholesale, Bulk Lots.

This has never been a primary way of finding stock for me, and I haven't bought this way for a couple of years. I decided it wasn't worth the time because I had a few bad experiences -- some crummy merchandise and one seller who never shipped at all. But if you're patient enough to keep looking for bargains, I'm sure it can pay off.

As far as unloading your books, I think there are two ways for you to approach it:

1. Maximum disclosure. Take a bunch of pictures, and include a list of every title and ISBN in your eBay listing. Otherwise you'll probably get pestered to death with questions, like "Can you give me a list of the titles?"

2. Just say up front, it's pot luck. You don't know what's in there, you just want to get rid of it.

The big disadvantage for buyers and sellers of book bulk lots is the enormous shipping costs that can be involved. So another way you might approach this is by advertising on Craig's List.

If you've never heard of it, Craig's List is a classified ad service, just like a newspaper, except it's online and free. (eBay bought the company a couple of years ago, but hasn't done anything to screw it up -- yet.)

So by using Craig's List, you can eliminate the two big sticking points of getting rid of a bulk lot -- shipping fees, and the advertising costs of placing a classified in your local paper. (Be sure to click through to your nearest metro area on Craig's List, otherwise all the ads you see will be from Craig's Lists' home base, San Francisco.)

You can use Craig's List the other way around, too, as a prospecting tool. For example, you could advertise: "Cash paid for your used books." It's time-consuming and involves a lot of e-mailing back and forth, but it's another way of getting stock that you wouldn't have found otherwise.

A shameless plug for my new book

This will be off-topic for some of you, but I hope you'll indulge me.

If you've poked around this Web site very much, you've noticed there's another blog about books. That one, however, is intended for authors, not sellers. It's a collection of things I've learned since writing "The Home-Based Bookstore" in 2005.

And if you're a book author or aspiring author, you might want to check out my new book by the same name, Plug Your Book! It explains how authors can find and build an audience using grassroots marketing on the Internet instead of paid advertising. Its product page on Amazon includes the table of contents, the introduction, and first chapter.

Q&A: What's the best strategy for getting books at library sales?

QUESTION: I'm about to attend my first seriously HUGE book sale in a few weeks. I'm a small-time seller hoping to slowly grow larger. I've got an idea of what I'm looking for, and the thrill of the hunt is always my favorite thing in these situations. But was curious of any tips you may offer.

ANSWER: Library sales are a great learning experience. They're the best opportunity for finding good books and getting good stock for an online used book business.

As far as your strategy for your first big sale, my advice depends a bit on how much experience you have picking books so far. As you surely know by now, this is not a get-rich-quick business.

However, assuming you've got a couple of months experience and are fairly good at recognizing the crappy books that don't sell online, my best advice is to go hogwild. That's assuming the books are priced fairly cheap (say, $1 to $3 apiece).

That's the approach I've always taken -- in my first six months, and now in my sixth year. I buy enough books so that I know my winners will outnumber my losers.

We can never control when an opportunity to find some great books comes along. There are never more than a few good library sales a month in my area. So you've got to take advantage when you can.

At a typical medium-sized library sale I'll buy $200 to $300 worth of books but end up with about $2,000 worth of stock. Sure, I'll end up with some junk and have to get rid of it later. But it's a great learning experience when you sit down at your computer and find out which of the books you picked were winners, and which were the dogs.

I don't really specialize in any type of book, but I usually avoid fiction since I don't know much about the demand for those books. Unless you have some expertise in fiction or collectibles, I'd stick with nonfiction in the beginning.

I use a cellphone for price checking, but I usually don't use it at a big sale, there isn't time. I check prices only when I'm buying from a used bookstore. I don't want to take the chance on a book that costs $10 for example, if the price on Amazon is $1.

Q&A: How can I list books for sale on Amazon's international sites?

QUESTION: Now that Amazon has done away with zShop listings in lieu of building a universal catalog, how does one go about listing a book that is already listed on Amazon.uk, for example? I have bought from other U.S. third-party sellers who have listings there. How can a single person set up such an account which requires you to have an address, checks and a credit card in that country?

I would imagine that to list a book in the U.K. catalog, one has to have some markup to cover shipping costs. Any insight on listing books that I cannot list at my regular Amazon.com (U.S.) account?

ANSWER: As you probably know, several weeks ago Amazon launched a feature where our U.S. listings automatically appear on the international sites, if the book isn't already for sale there, and assuming we've checked "Yes" for international shipping.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not?) I've gotten lots of e-mail lately from sellers having trouble listing books on Amazon.com which were published outside the U.S. Maybe this is a temporary glitch, maybe not.

Anyway, back to your question: Apparently a lot of U.S. sellers open up accounts on the international sites so they can sell there directly -- although it sounds like a lot of trouble to me.

However, if you were doing a good volume of business at the international sites, it might be worth it to set up an account with one of the software vendors that can provide some automation, so that you're not constantly having to manually delete the listings that sell.

I'm totally clueless about this, so I asked Shaun Jamieson, the business development manager at FillZ, for some more elaboration, and the answers appear below. (FillZ is one of several companies that provide automation tools for Amazon sellers.)

QUESTION: If a seller was using your software, can they automatically list on Amazon's U.K., German, Canadian and French sites using their .com account? Or does selling on these other sites require new accounts with those international sites? Can someone sell on those international sites without software such as yours, just by using their browser?

ANSWER: FillZ offers access to all of these markets, but you still have to have separate seller accounts for each market. Sellers can sell directly on those international sites without of a service like FillZ, but it’s more difficult to maintain you inventory when you are getting orders from multiple markets simultaneously.

The main barriers to selling on these markets are having a local mailing address and bank account. FillZ has a referral program to help sellers get set up with escrow bank accounts in Germany and the UK . This makes the decision to list on their markets easier. Since we put this program in place, a number of existing sellers have started listing on the international Amazon markets. I know of sellers who had flown overseas just to get his accomplished.

QUESTION: It seems a lot of sellers are having trouble listing certain books on Amazon.com now because of listings appearing on the international sites. I'm not sure I understand the problem -- whether it's a bug, or just the way things are now.

ANSWER: We have many sellers who list the same inventory on multiple markets including the international Amazon markets. We have, however, only ever heard from one seller who received an error message for an item that was listed to Amazon.com in the context you mention.

This seller was told something to the effect of: This item was already listed on Amazon.co.uk and could therefore could not be listed on Amazon.com. After further clarification and investigation, it appeared as though this item had an ISBN that was in the UK catalog (UK ISBN), and was not in the .com catalog.

I don’t think Amazon was saying the item could not be listed on both markets. I think they were saying the item was not recognized by the catalogue of one market (.com) and were suggesting they list it on the other market (.co.uk).