What does CWS mean for us booksellers?  Not much.  You will not have your account credited until you ship a book.  If you use The Art of Books or a similar inventory management system Amazon should be automatically updated when the book is shipped.   There are a couple of downsides to Amazon’s Charge When Shipped – you do not get to send your own confirmation email to the buyer and the buyer can still leave feedback on a canceled order.

I like sending out my own confirmations.  They promote my “brand” (nominally) and provide a more personalized experience.  Also I ask that buyers contact me directly with any issues before going to Amazon and filing feedback or a “A to Z” claim.   The sample confirmation email that Amazon has provided does not include seller contact information.  Many times I  have been contacted by unhappy buyer (mistakenly of course since I am perfect lol) who has an issues with the condition of the book.  Though it turns out that they didn’t read the book description closely or their idea of what a bumped corner (or similar damage) is different then mine.  With direct communication with the buyer I can resolve these issues to the buyers satisfaction quickly. My guess is that neutral or negative feedback will increase with less direct communication with the buyer.

Hopefully, Amazon CWS will go smoothly but I am concerned that Amazon is going to cause problems for a lot of sellers given how their feedback system works.

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People who buy Kindles are either gadget heads who just want the latest thing or they are avid readers who love having a portable library.  The avid readers are likely avid book buyers so the transition of their book sales to electronic form will have a long-term negative effect on online booksellers.  Will this happen soon – not likely but it does not bode well. 

One of the issues with the Kindle is that Amazon is pricing titles on it less than they are a regular copy of a book.  This can have the effect of havingo nline booksellers trying to beat the Kindle price on books.  I am not sure if the inventory and scouting services are showing Kindle prices yet but maybe they should.

Lets not forget that the Kindle is not the only device out there – Sony also makes one and you can even put books on your iPhone.  Sales of the Kindle are one thing but it remains to be seen if people are actually going to adapt to using it as their primary way to read – as we have seen with Amazon recenlty deleting Orwell titles there are several issues with the Kindle that will effect its popularity.

Electronic reading devices are going to have to become a whole lot more popular for online booksellers to throw in the towel

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Some states do not require you to pay sales taxes on online business but I know where I live requires it.  So I pay the few hundred dollars a year.  I hate doing it (though my wife handles figuring out what I owe which is the most frustrating part).  I don’t do it to be moral or anything but I do it because I am running a business and do not want to jeopardize my bookselling business by cutting corners.  I don’t do mental gymnastics over this decision – I just keep it simple and cut the check to the state and I have no worries.  I did my research about whether I need to pay and that was that.

If you sell books online check with your accountant ( if oyou have one) or go to your states website and start doing your research – or just ignore it and hope you have no reason to be concerned

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The maximum number you can put for sale is 250 titles – and I think I will be using the full amount.  You can offer free shipping which I recommend as it improves your best match search results.  When offering free shipping inside the markdown manager you have to make sure you are not also offering insurance as an option as this causes some sort of conflict and none of your  books will get added to the sale. 

When I have a sale I generally provide a 10% to 20% discount on my 250 highest priced titles.  I may tweak this formula this time and only pick the titles that are below $40 and see if I get more sales as I already provide “Best Offer” on everything above that.

There are lots of ways to get your inventory moving during slow times – just don’t get to demoralized.

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If you sell remainders (there are some that specialize in universtity presses) the text book season is when they move – so you could find some titles to buy in preparation for the school year.  Try Great Jones for academic books – the margins on these are not great but if you can find a good title to buy in bulk in might be worth it.

Also – be prepared for lots of questions if your listings are not complete.  Make sure you properly list what edition text book you are selling and if it has highlighting, underlining or margin notes – I make it the first thing in the item description.  Do not sell international editions (or if you do be prepared to be banned by eBay and Amazon as it is against their terms).

More on textbook season soon

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There are several apps for the iPhone that try to replicate a scanner by taking a photo or video of a barcode and transmit back price info. These scanning apps will often have trouble reading a barcode and the info they give back isn’t all the info booksellers need. Amazon has their own app that when you take a photo of an item it emails you back the info – this is a bit slow if you are at a library sale but okay if you are just out at one of your book buying haunts. SnapTell is another app that is pretty good and like the Amazon app it is free.

If you have an iPhone it is clear the capability is there to provide an application that will be able to integrate with the Amazon database and provide Amazon sales rank info, book conditions and price info. At the very least the app would enable you to download the database and be able to get the info you want from it the catch is going to be getting the isbn’s entered into the iPhone quickly.

The camera on the new iPhone has been improved and hopefully we are close to seeing the potential uses for booksellers come to fruition.

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Yesterday I sold two items using Ebay’s Best Offer. Both were sold for less than the current lowest price the item was listed for on Amazon but based on each items sales rank I accepted. Here are both items:

• Photoshop CS3 Sharpening Images (CD Rom) – listed for $89 with a Amazon Sales Rank of #1,643,176.  The CD was listed for sale on 12/18/08. I accepted a Best Offer on Ebay of $50.  My cost was $4 to buy the CD.
• UVB Instrumentation and Applications-  listed for $68 with a Amazon Sales Rank of #3,783,937 .   The book was listed for sale on by me on 10/13/08.  I accepted a Best Offer on Ebay of $50.  My cost was $3 to buy the book.

Did I leave some money on the table?  Possibly – especially with the Photoshop CD but look at those sales ranks.  When would be the next time I even get interest in them?  The UVB book could sit in inventory for a couple of years before it sells.  Remember over time the price of your books will likely drop in terms of other sellers under-pricing you which is to say that you may not ever get your asking price anyway.

This is why I always use Best Offer because of the flexibility it gives me.  I do not have to accept the first offer.  Many buyers likely expect you to counter with a higher offer so it makes sense to do so.  For the two books above I saw a quick $100 in sales with some monster profits on slow selling inventory so I just accepted the offers.

What would you have done?  Let me knw

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• Hopefully all you booksellers plan ahead for slower summer sales and take some of the higher earning from December-February and allocate it for these months so you can keep up with buying inventory.  Both Microsoft and Quicken offer free accounting software that you can use to help with planning ahead and managing your financials. Quicken’s software is the standard that most people use but both are fine.
• Cull your inventory – going through it and de-listing the stuff that has dropped too low in price.
• Re-price more often and more aggressively if cash flow is an issue. 
• Re-visit your expenses – check all your subscriptions and services – shop around some of their competitors may offer the same services for less.  Look around for deals on shipping supplies etc.
• Branch out – if you are doing this from home – there are a myriad of ways to make money online – start doing some research but do not dive in head first in something new.  I wrote an guide about selling books online to help add some monthly revenue (you can sign up for a coupon for it in the upper right of this blog).  In a future post (coming soon) I will talk about some other ideas for branching out.

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I don’t go to book sales much anymore but you can slowly build up your inventory by going to them.  The downside to Friend of Library sales is that they are overrun with other booksellers with their scanner many of whom work in teams.  I would often see people running into the sale and indiscriminately  scooping up armfuls of books  and putting them into bags then running to a blanket where there partner is and doing it again.  There would be no selection process – just a mad rush which would mean if you were not on of the first on line you find many books gone (and piled up on someones blanket).

I remember one sale where someone had hundreds of books piled up on a blanket after they had run like crazy through the sale – at the end of it they had hundreds of discards left laying on the grass in a pile after they had scanned them all.  Me – I would be happy to leave with 30 good books.

I hate having to get to the sales 90 minutes early to get a decent place online.  When you get in there is barely any space to move let alone put your books down.  God forbid if the place where the sale was used air conditioning too.  Also – many sales will cherry pick some titles out and put them online themselves.

This has turned into a big gripe on library sales but let me back up and restate that you can find books at them and often find some treasures at them that make it all worthwhile.  I found some rare physics texts that sold for hundreds of dollars at one sale.  These books were sitting there well after the intial mad rush but had been bypassed because they were old  (from the early sixties and pre-isbn)

Anyway – if Friend of Library sales are your thing then Good Luck and Good Hunting.

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Let’s assume the book weighs less than 1lb for shipping purposes

$4.00 – is the amount collected by Amazon – this is the $.01 plus the $3.99 standard shipping charge.

($1.35) – is the amount Amazon takes out of the shipping leaving $2.65.

($2.38) – the amount to ship a book that weighs 1lb or less via media mail as of today.

Potential profit $.27.  Twenty-Seven Cents - not factoring in other expenses such as labels, envelopes, internet, time spent listing and shipping and all the other subscription fees that make up your overhead.  So lets say a penny seller can make $.20 on each sale.  You would need to sell 500 books a day to make $100 a day at that rate – which means you are going to have to have someone help you prep all those books for shipping further eating into your profits. 

 Does this make sense as a business model – not to me.  Understand though – this is their business model – penny sellers are not by accident.  So they must be ok with those lousy margins.  Maybe the penny sellers do not value their time properly and are ok with stuffing 500 envelopes with books for $.20 each.

Sellers of books for a penny are the worst – they clutter Amazon with the junk listings with no descriptions but they do make money and so does Amazon.  Remember – Amazon makes $1.35 for every penny book sold.

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