Posts Tagged ‘Selling Books’

Selling Books On Amazon: Handling Policy Violations

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

I’ve warned you about selling on Amazon, and how important knowing the rules is. Nothing brings that point into sharp relief quite like getting a notice from Amazon that you are in violation of their policies. That’s exactly what happened to me recently. Failing to comply with Amazon’s policies can mean serious penalties up to and including losing your seller account, which is, quite frankly a terrifying prospect for anyone who makes their living selling used books online.

In this case, the violation had to do with my confirmation emails. I am in the practice of sending out an email whenever I ship a book, just to let the customer know that their books are on their way. It’s good customer service and doesn’t take much time once you develop a boilerplate message to send out. The issue was that in the signature of my email was the URL of my own website.

Now, these emails are only sent after the transaction is complete. I would never try and divert a customer from buying a book I had listed on Amazon to buy it from my own site instead. That is pretty much Amazon’s cardinal sin and if you get caught doing it, you can pretty much expect instant expulsion. The way I justified what I was doing was that the customer had already bought the book and Amazon had already got their cut. What was wrong with letting the customer know I also had an independent site after the sale was complete?

A lot.

(more…)

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Posted in Marketplaces | 5 Comments »

Used Books are Green: "It's Like Carpooling for Books"

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

green books Selling used books is, by its very nature, environmentally friendly. Obviously books are made of paper. Every book that is created has an environmental impact both in terms of trees being cut down, and in terms of the fossil fuels burned in manufacturing, shipping, etc. Every time a person buys a used book instead of a new one, it chips away at those impacts.

According to this article on ecology.com, “world consumption of paper has grown four hundred percent in the last 40 years” and “nearly 4 billion trees or 35% of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries”. It goes on to quote an EPA report that found that “pulp and paper mills are among the worst polluters to air, water and land of any industry”. Obviously anything we can do to reduce this environmental devastation is a great thing for the planet.

Despite the environmental costs of making books, there is an environmental upshot to the nature of books. Books aren’t perishable or depletable , they never “go bad” and you can use them without “using them up”. In fact, books can be used again and again by as many people as can get their hands on them. As sellers of used books, we are facilitating that process, finding new homes for books.

Whether they knew it or not, used bookstores were green before it was cool. The advent of online sellers like you and me just (more…)

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Posted in Selling Books | 2 Comments »

Buying Books at Library Sales: Good for You and Good for the Community

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Buying your used books from library sales is a great way to find books to sell online. While you and I and all the other booksellers are profiting from the books we find at library sales, it’s easy to forget that with every book you buy there, you’re also supporting a good cause.

I get reminded about that fact from time to time, especially when I read an article like the one that recently ran in Wisconsin in the Superior Telegram. In the article, Janet Jennings reports that the local Friends of the Library group has donated a walker with a book basket attached to the library. The walker will help “those that need some assistance with fetching their own books, but have difficulty holding them.”

Library sales support libraries. A cynical way of looking at libraries is that they are giving away for free the very thing we sell to make our living. But in reality, there’s no (more…)

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Posted in Buying | No Comments »

Bookselling Tools: Auto Repricing (part 1 of 3)

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

If you are new to bookselling, you may not be aware of one of the most valuable tools available to you to help you sell books: auto repricing.

Basically, auto repricing is done through applications which are hosted either on your desktop or remotely on the web. You set up rules for a group of listings, and the software automatically reprices your listing based on listings by other sellers. For instance, you can set it to take the lowest price for a book and either do a price match, set the price slightly higher than that price, etc. Some sellers even set the rules to set the price lower than their lowest competitor but that, in my humble opinion, is just plain stupid. You can also set up more advanced rules, for example, you can set them up to base the reprice off of the third lowest price, rather than the lowest, or set them to match condition, etc.

I’ve used a few different repricing applications over the years. There’s some overlap with the companies I talked about in the (more…)

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Posted in Tools | 2 Comments »

Selling Books Knows No Borders

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Many booksellers consider questions like “What books can I sell?” and “How can I sell my books?” but fail to ask themselves “Where can I sell my books?”.  Where on the planet can you find customers? What countries can you ship your books to?

Where can you sell your books? Worldwide.

It’s too bad that some booksellers don’t consider the international market, because they’re essentially closing themselves off from countless potential customers. Maybe they think selling internationally is too complicated, or they just don’t want to spend the time to learn how to do it. I can’t say for sure why some sellers don’t take advantage of the world of opportunities out there, but for me, it’s a no-brainer.

Think about it. There’s 6.7 billion people out there. How much are you limiting yourself if you only sell in one or two countries? Admittedly, in practice selling worldwide doesn’t mean exponential increases in sales. But if there are any customers out there who want to buy my books, why wouldn’t I make myself available to them?

I’ve sold books in more countries than I can list. Name a country and I’ve probably sent a book there. A lot of those sales (especially the ones to more exotic locales) are from my website, but I’ve also sold on:

  • Amazon
  • Amazon UK, DE, FR, CA
  • Alibris & partners
  • AbeBooks
  • Ebay

To sell on Amazon UK [United Kingdom], DE [Germany], FR [France], or CA [Canada], you need to set up a bank account in whichever country you are doing business.

If you want to get into international selling I recommend checking out WorldFirst a UK-based foreign exchange broker. They specialize in this kind of thing.

Shipping
Just like shipping domestically, you have different options for shipping abroad. There are Brokers, UPS Mail Innovations, DHL (usually for larger shipments), and of course, our old friend USPS.

Pricing
Be sure to take into account currency exchange rates. You may also need to compensate for the fact that shipping credits won’t always cover your costs.

This is just the briefest of brief overviews on selling internationally. The point is to be aware of what’s out there, and to take advantage every opportunity.

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Posted in Strategies | No Comments »