The Internet provides a wide array of selling venue choices for the prospective online bookseller, but it is possible to waste a great deal of time and effort trying to diversify one’s listings when there may not be any good business reason for doing so. From a business point of view, it is important to begin by making a list of the factors that might be important to you in determining where to list your books. Here are my suggestions:
· What sites offer the most traffic?
· Within that traffic volume, how many visitors come to the site with their credit cards ready for the express purpose of buying books?
· Within a site, how prominently and strategically will your listings be displayed?
· What are the user-friendliness issues involved in a particular selling venue, both for your prospective buyers and for you as a seller?
· What are the costs of listing and selling your books on a particular venue?
· How much of your catalogue can you list prominently on a given venue?
Rather than try to adopt a false guise of impartiality, let me say that I have studied these questions long and hard and concluded long ago that the Amazon Marketplace is overwhelmingly the most profitable place to sell books online, provided that the books one is attempting to list are in the Amazon catalogue. Here’s my take:
· Other sites such as search engines or information sites may rival Amazon in traffic, but they are not primarily e-commerce sites.
· Amazon is the world’s largest Internet retailer, and more people come to Amazon to purchase books than all other Internet retailers and databases combined.
· The Amazon Marketplace (as opposed to zShops or Amazon Auctions) allows the highest profile of display prominence for third-party book listings of any site on the Internet, and the results of this strategic prominence are borne out by the fact that over 23% of all transactions involve third-party sellers, as of the first quarter of 2002.
· Amazon is absolutely top-shelf when it comes to user-friendliness for its ultimate customers.
· Amazon’s user-friendliness for sellers leaves much to be desired, with frequent glitches that can prove frustrating or worrisome for sellers. These frustrations and the fact that Amazon offers its Marketplace, zShop, and Auction services on an “as is” basis notwithstanding, Amazon is still at least as good as, and possibly superior to its competitors when it comes to ease of use for sellers.
· The cost of doing business on Amazon is amazingly low when one thinks of it as “rent” for prime selling space in the world’s largest e-commerce mall: an Amazon Pro Merchant account is $39.99 per month, and a seller then pays what is effectively a commission of 15 per cent of the selling price of each sold item. (The Pro Merchant account is an option, and you also have the choice of not paying it and instead paying an additional 99 cents per unit for each sold item, but this only makes sense for the casual or very low-volume seller. If you have spent the money to buy this book, I would recommend that, once you have gone through a brief experimental period, you try to get to the point as soon as possible where you can spend the money to become a Pro Merchant seller and take the steps necessary to make sure that you sell the 40 items per month necessary to eat up that $39.99).
· Aside from politics, the primary factor that drives sellers to venues other than Amazon is the lack of a universal catalogue, something that Amazon claims to be working on. Currently sellers of most pre-ISBN books (that is, books more than about 30 years old) cannot sell them on the Amazon Marketplace. If, however, you are dealing with a general stock of more or less contemporary used books, Amazon will allow you to list prominently the vast majority of books you acquire.
If Amazon is the easiest and most cost-effective venue for listing general stock books online, then Half.com runs a strong, if not close, second. If you are just starting out as an online seller of general stock, you will probably want to limit your initial activity to these two venues. If you also carry some collectible or older items that you are unable to list on Amazon or Half.com, or interesting groups of books that might best be sold as “lots,” you may also want to consider eBay as an initial venue.
Once you begin contemplating more than a single venue for selling, it is time to consider two extremely important and related issues:
· The sticky problem of “out of stock” updating. If you are going to list the same copies simultaneously on multiple venues, you will need to establish, on the front end, an air-tight system for updating your listings on all affected sites to reflect and take out of inventory your sold copies. Some multiple-venue sellers avoid duplicating their listings from site to site because they are not confident in their solutions to these problems, and even the most well-organized system or software can be sabotaged by a fiasco such as a period of roughly two weeks in the Spring of 2002 when Amazon’s site maintenance problems made it impossible for many sellers to update or edit existing listings.
· Any well-organized solution to the challenge of updating sold listings in multiple venues will necessarily involve the use of a database, and a good starting point for considering such software is to take a look at a service called BookRouter (www.bookrouter.com) that, for a fee, will handle all of your uploading, price adjustments, deletions, and other processing for as many selling venues as you wish to deal with. BookRouter charges a setup fee of $50 and a monthly fee of $25 for up to five sites, with an additional $5 on each fee for each additional site. BookRouter will work with virtually any software configuration a seller might use. I recommend that you begin this exploration by reading BookRouter’s Glossary and Primer at bookrouter.com/brglossary.html.
In any case, as you gain experience and perhaps develop a range of listings that goes beyond general stock, you may well want to branch out for any number of reasons, including selling advantages, your desire to support bookseller databases, and your perception that it would be wise not to keep all your eggs in a single basket. Here is a list, with basic contact information, of bookselling venues you may wish to explore:
Amazon Marketplace
URL: www.amazon.com/marketplace
EMAIL: sellers-support@amazon.com
TELEPHONE: 800-201-7575 or 877-251-0696 (Between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. Pacific time, Monday through Friday) FAX: 206-266-2950
FEE STRUCTURE: Amazon uses a two-tiered fee structure for third party sellers. If you anticipate selling 10 items a week or more, you will want to become a Pro Merchant Seller so that you can list an unlimited number of items, waive the 99-cent-per-item transaction fee, and pay only Amazon’s 15 per cent commission (this includes credit card processing). The Pro Merchant fee is $39.99 per month and will be listed in your Amazon.com Payments account summary and charged against existing account funds. In the event of a negative account balance, the Seller’s registered credit card will be charged for outstanding fees.
DESCRIPTION: Individuals and businesses can buy and sell used and collectible books, music, DVDs, videos, console-based video games, electronics items, tools, and photography equipment directly on the product information page where Amazon.com sells the same item new, provided that the item to be listed is already in Amazon’s catalogue. “There is no finer real estate online,” claims Amazon, and it is hard to argue with the claim given Amazon’s customer base of roughly 30 million. All payments are always processed online by Amazon Payments and will clear into your account in about five days, or biweekly if you do not initiate the transfers yourself.
Amazon zShops and Auctions
EMAIL: seller-support@amazon.com; community-help@amazon.com - report a community rules violation; reports@amazon.com - report abuse
TELEPHONE: 800-201-7575 or 877-251-0696 (Between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. Pacific time, Monday through Friday) FAX: 206-266-2950
FEE STRUCTURE: zShops listing fees of 10 cents per item and transaction fees of 5% for the first $25 and 2.5% above $25. Payment processing fees for payments made through Amazon Payments are $0.25 per item, plus 2.5% of the transaction amount, but Sellers may also accept other forms of payment. Per-item listing fees are waived for Pro Merchant sellers, whose subscription fee of $39.99 per month is listed in their Amazon.com Payments account summary and charged against any sales they have completed.
DESCRIPTION: Fixed-price and auction options for items not listed in the Amazon catalogue, with zShops storefronts and access – but far less site prominence than Amazon Marketplace – to Amazon’s customer base. You may list “almost anything under the sun” for sale and cross-link it to Amazon items to attract buyers, but the cross-links (which used to be quite prominent before the advent of Amazon Marketplace) can be almost impossible to find, because they often require a buyer to scroll down a half-dozen or more screens. It will be interesting to see if Amazon finds an effective way to re-tool and improve the prominence of zShops; at this writing many long-time zShops-only sellers express a feeling of abandonment by Amazon since the advent of Marketplace.
Half.com
URL: www.half.ebay.com/products/books/index.cfm
EMAIL: books@half.com or Info@half.com
TELEPHONE: (888) 879-4253 or 1 (800) 545-9857 FEE STRUCTURE: “At Half.com, there are no start-up, listing or monthly fees. We simply take a commission off the selling price at the time of the sale.” The commission structure begins at 15% for items under $50, 12.5% between $50 and $100, 10% between $100 and $250, etc.
DESCRIPTION: Initially established by Josh Kopelman as a fixed-price marketplace for used books in July 1999, Half.com was acquired by eBay one year later and now allows sellers to offer new or used books, music, and video products. Half.com has attracted a high volume of sellers and buyers, although far fewer than Amazon Marketplace, and offers over 50 million items for sale. The imbalance between sellers and buyers is evident in the fact that Half.com has price markets considerably lower than those on Amazon Marketplace, even with a 75-cent price minimum, on the vast majority of items except those where the Marketplace price is below 75 cents. Otherwise, Half.com is extremely user-friendly and tends to create a smooth listing and selling experience.
EBay Auctions
URL: www.ebay.com
EMAIL: eBay discourages direct email contact by does provide a web-based email support system at www.pages.ebay.com/help/basics/select-support.html
FEE STRUCTURE: eBay charges a listing fee of between $.30 and $3.30 depending on the minimum bid set by a seller, a final value fee that ranges from 1.50% to 5.25% of the final sale price, and an eBay Payments fee of $.35 plus 3% for transactions over $15 or a flat $.35 for transactions under $15.
DESCRIPTION: eBay is the world’s largest internet auction site and hosts millions of book transactions each year. Its high traffic makes it a good place to sell books that are not in the Amazon catalogue, particularly those that are relatively scarce. Many sellers also have had success selling “lots” of books in particular interest categories such as older mysteries, sports books, etc., on eBay. Learning the ropes of auction-selling is a must for those who hope to do significant business on eBay, and we recommend a series of articles by auction bookseller Craig Stark that are available at AuctionBytes, beginning at this web address: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y201/m06/abu0039/s05
Advanced Book Exchange
URL: www.abebooks.com
EMAIL: ABE Financial: invoice@abebooks.com; ABE/Half.com Program: half.com@abebooks.com; Web-based “Help Wizard” at www.dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/ActionRequestInsert
TELEPHONE: 1-800-315-5335 6AM-10PM Mon-Fri; 10AM-2PM Sat PSTFAX: 1 - 250 - 475 - 6016 FEE STRUCTURE: Instead of collecting from booksellers when a book is sold, Abebooks charges an up-front monthly subscription rate based on the number of titles listed. At this writing, the monthly fee for U.S. booksellers is $25 for up to 500 titles, $37 for 501 to 4,000 titles, $42 to 4,001 to 10,000 titles, and $53 for 10,001 to 20,000 titles.
DESCRIPTION: Abebooks, a network of about 9,000 independent booksellers, is a private company, registered in Victoria, B.C., Canada. Founded by Keith Waters and Rick Pura, it launched in 1996 and provides its members with the online capability of selling their books to customers worldwide. In the Fall of 2001, ABEBooks acquired European JustBooks, enabling further expansion into the international marketplace. Abebooks has over 35 million rare, antiquarian, used and out-of-print book listings, and to the extent possible within the Half.com catalogue, its listings are also listed on Half.com, just as at this writing Alibris’ listings are also listed on Amazon Marketplace. Abebooks provides a free database software program called Homebase, specifically designed with used, rare, and out-of-print booksellers in mind, which is free and downloadable from the Abebooks website at www.abebooks.com. “By combining the inventories of our member booksellers into a common database and coupling it with advanced search capabilities, e-commerce facilities, and partnership programs, ABEBooks has become a dominant player in the Internet book market,” says the Abebooks website.
Alibris
URL: www.alibris.com
EMAIL: sellers@alibris.com
SNAIL MAIL: Alibris, 1250 45th Street, Suite 100
Emeryville, CA 94608. FEE STRUCTURE: Alibris takes a 20% commission from the price paid by the ultimate customers and sends the balance to the seller. Alibris has historically provided sellers with prepaid shipping labels so that they can send ordered books to Alibris at no cost beyond the cost of packaging.
DESCRIPTION: Alibris is both a bookseller in its own right, with its own in-house inventory, and a centralized listings service, with centralized shipping and ordering for its member sellers. Alibris in turn lists many of its members’ books on Amazon Marketplace, which has raised concerns about redundancy for some sellers. Alibris’ “partners,” the sellers who list their books with Alibris, have historically shipped sold items directly to Alibris which repackages them and sends them on to the ultimate customers, but at this writing Alibris appears to be changing this approach.
Antiqbook
URL: www.antiqbook.com
EMAIL: nan@antiqbook.nl
FEE STRUCTURE: Rather than hazard an effort to translate the Euro into U.S. currency, let us say here that the fee structure is organized in a fashion similar to ABEBooks’, but is slightly lower.
DESCRIPTION: An independent book listing service of the Netherlands Antiquarian Booksellers' Network, based out of the Netherlands
BiblioDirect.com
URL: www.BiblioDirect.com
EMAIL: admin@BiblioDirect.com . “If you have a question, just log onto www.BiblioDirect.com and click on the icon in the upper right hand corner. If there is an operator on-line, you may ask the question and get an immediate response; if we’re offline at the moment, it will direct you to an e-mail address. If you have any questions, suggestions or issues, or need dealer/buyer conflict resolution please send them to: jan@BiblioDirect.com”
FEE STRUCTURE: Instead of collecting from booksellers when a book is sold, BiblioDirect charges an up-front monthly subscription rate based on the number of titles listed. At this writing, the monthly fee for U.S. booksellers is $25 for up to 1,000 titles, $30 for 1,001 to 4,999 titles, $35 to 5,000 to 9,999 titles, and $40 for 10,000 to 19,999 titles.
DESCRIPTION: “BiblioDirect.com (incorporated as Bibliophile Books, Inc.) was conceived by three booksellers: Lynn DeWeese-Parkinson, who has a store by that name in Forest Grove, Oregon, and Roger and Jan O'Connor, who own Mostly Books in Pittsburg, Kansas. As long-time booksellers themselves (more than 100 years of collective experience), they wanted to bring back the traditional standards, values, practices, and competence of the book trade to the innovative world of Internet bookselling. BiblioDirect.com is designed to facilitate the transaction between the buyer and the seller without getting in the middle. All transactions are made at the dealer's price and under the dealer's terms with no mark-ups, additional shipping fees, or commissions.”
Bibliology
URL: www.bibliology.com
EMAIL:membership@bibliology.com or enquries@bibliology.com
FEE STRUCTURE: “Books are listed on the basis of a monthly subscription, with the benefit of a secure ordering system. There are no further charges or commissions.” The monthly fee is 25 pounds for up to 5,000 listings, 35 pounds for 5,001 to 10,000 listings, 40 pounds for 10,001 to 20,000 listings, and so forth.
DESCRIPTION: "The on-line book fair", UK-based Bibliogy, describes itself as “a secure and informative book site, with an excellent search mechanism, where booksellers and book buyers come together…. Bibliology does not interfere in the relationship between booksellers and their customers.”
Biblion
URL: www.biblion.com
EMAIL: www.biblion.com/contact.php
TELEPHONE: 020 7495 0219, between 9am and 6pm GMT Monday to Friday. FEE STRUCTURE: For listings of 1,000 books or more, a monthly fee of 29.37 pounds (this includes the British Value Added Tax, or sales tax, of 17.5%). If prepaid annually, there is a discount equal to two months’ fees. Or, as a third option, sellers may forego the subscription fee altogether and instead pay a commission of 11.75% (this commission also includes the Value Added Tax).
DESCRIPTION: A UK-based antiquarian and rare book listings service.
Bibliophile
URL: www.bibliophile.net
EMAIL: benson@bibliophile.net
TELEPHONE: +41 1 364 57 11 FEE STRUCTURE: “Bibliophile.net is currently a free listing service. If and when we charge a listing fee, it will be based on the number of books listed.”
DESCRIPTION: “We are a privately-held, independent company and intend to stay that way,” says Jack Benson of Swiss-based Bibliophile. “Our listing service has been on-line for three years in its present format. We are the first to admit that sales are still low compared to those generated by our bigger competitors, in large part due to limitations in what we can spend on advertising. This is the price of independence. Nevertheless, we sell several hundred books per week for our booksellers, and these numbers are rising steadily. Our multilingual interface targets additional markets for your books.”
BookAvenue
URL: www.bookavenue.co
EMAIL: info@bookavenue.com
FEE STRUCTURE: Instead of collecting from booksellers when a book is sold, BookAvenue charges an up-front monthly subscription rate based on the number of titles listed. At this writing, the monthly fee for U.S. booksellers is $9.95 for up to 1,999 titles, $19.95 for 2,000 to 24,999 titles, etc.
DESCRIPTION: A centralized listing service that describes its transactions as follows: “When your books(s) are matched with customers search criteria, your dealer information will be displayed along with the below text as your terms of sale. You may want to include such things as additional costs to the customer, return information, what types of payment you accept, etc.”
Books & Collectibles
URL: www.booksandcollectibles.com.au
EMAIL: admin@booksandcollectibles.com.au
FEE STRUCTURE: Instead of collecting from booksellers when a book is sold, Books and Collectibles charges an up-front monthly subscription rate based on the number of titles listed. At this writing, the monthly fee is $25 Australian for up to 1,999 titles, $40 Australian for 2,000 to 10,000 titles, $50 Australian for 10,001 to 40,000 titles, etc. As an introductory offer, the first two months of service are free.
DESCRIPTION: Books and Collectibles is an Australian listings service for antiquarian, rare, out of print and new books, plus antiques, fine arts and collectibles. All transactions are between buyer and seller; Books and Collectibles acts as a meeting point between parties.
TomFolio
URL: www.tomfolio.com
EMAIL: www.tomfolio.com/sendmessage.asp?type=2
SNAIL MAIL: TomFolio, P.O. Box 392, Readville, MA 02137 FEE STRUCTURE: Instead of collecting from booksellers when a book is sold, TomFolio charges an up-front monthly listing fee ($35 for up to 4,000 titles, $40 for 4,001 to 10,000 titles, $45 for 10,001 to 25,000 titles, etc.) based on the number of titles listed. Members are also encouraged to become co-operative share owners for $500, payable either in a lump sum or in 10 monthly payments.
DESCRIPTION: A bookseller-owned listings service, run by the ABookCoop independent booksellers cooperative.
Getting Rid of Your Deadwood
Once you have determined that you cannot sell a given book online at a price that makes it worthwhile, you don’t necessarily have to give up on it, assuming it is good enough shape to pass it on. It makes good sense for an online seller to develop and cultivate some offline selling venues short of the ponderously expensive project of actually opening up a brick-and-mortar bookstore, and here are a few to consider:
· You may well be able to sell your unwanted books to existing brick-and-mortar used bookshops, either for cash or, better yet, for a higher trading credit with which you can pick over bargain items in their inventory for which you believe you will be able to find an online buyer. This kind of trading obviously requires an instinct or feel for the books you are acquiring that will likely grow much better with experience, so don’t get in over your head before you know what you are doing.
· Yard sales, garage sales, flea markets, and antique malls are great places to unload unwanted book inventory for small amounts of cash, and you don’t necessarily have to be the one holding the sale or renting the space. Keep an eye out for the friend, neighbor, or relative who is planning such a sale or who rents space at a flea market or antique mall and see if you can make a deal at 50-50 or better.
· My favorite option, partly because it is easy, final, and does not depend on the whim of a buyer, is to donate such inventory back to the local public library. Yes, I am in business to make money, but I also endeavor to be a good citizen. Besides that, it does make money by giving one a deduction at tax time based on the amount you paid for each book, and it also helps create good will at the library, which is as important a place to have good will as any, given the fact that it is a major source of used books. And I have never had one of the librarians diss one of my discards by saying, “Uh, no, I don’t think we’d be interested in that!”
