Bookselling Tools: Auto Repricing (part 2 of 3)
Book selling is not unlike selling in any other market: price matters. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who believes you have to always have the lowest price on every book. However, in a market where prices and demand are constantly shifting and fluctuating, you do need to know where you stand in relation to the prices that other sellers are offering. If you don’t auto reprice or manually reprice in today’s online bookselling market, especially on Amazon,
it will definitely reduce your possibilities for selling your books.
There are a certain number of buyers who will buy from me based on my Amazon rating and size. I sell books that are definitely not the lowest price, books that some sell as penny books that I list for .99, 1.99, 2.99.There are buyers who seek out sellers based on feedback. However, these buyers are in the minority, and I can’t base business model on them.
There are just buyers just don’t consider anything but the price.
It’s all about knowing and taking advantage of strategies and tactics that will benefit you. As a large volume seller I’ve automated many parts of business. It saves on labor and lowers my costs. Part of that automation includes using auto repricing.
When I was working at a smaller volume I could afford to not play the repricing game. Having become large volume seller of low margin product, this is game that large volume sellers are in. Don’t think that it hasn’t crossed my mind to go back to being a smaller volume seller with higher margins, but there are some inherent advantages to scale.
In the comments on the last post another bookseller, Adam from sellyourbooksonline.com, pointed out some of the issues in working with FillZ in particular. He’s right. It can be difficult to set up auto repricing that works for you. To get good results with some services, you have to be able to write your own scripts. I’ve written scripts that I’ve used and I have some knowledge of how to access the data from Amazon.
The challenge I encountered was that the more rules I wrote, the harder it got. Having a lot of rules made script too clunky.
It was made even tougher with Amazon’s implementation of consolidated SKUs. It is really tough to write these customized scripts to handle consolidated SKUs. For more on what a consolidated SKU is and how it affects repricing, stay tuned for part 3.
Tags: sell books
